I read a little recently about Thomas Jefferson, a well-known man for many accomplishments, including such things as being the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, being the third president of the United States. He was an inventor, an architect, and just an all-around smart guy. but he was also a pretty awful theologian. Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to someone in which he explained some of his beliefs about Jesus and the Bible. And here is an excerpt of that letter. He said, among the sayings and discourses imputed to him, meaning Jesus, by his biographers, meaning Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence, and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being." Thus are the words of Thomas Jefferson. Now he was saying that some of what is attributed to the words of Jesus in the Gospels is good, and he liked it. But other parts of what is attributed to Jesus is just plain awful. And his conclusion was that the good parts and agreeable stuff Jesus actually said that. But the stuff that Jefferson didn't like or didn't agree with, well obviously his disciples misquoted, misrepresented, or just plain lied about what Jesus said. He then later goes on to say this in that same letter. Of this band of dupes and imposters, referring to Jesus' disciples, Paul was the great choreophys. I don't think I said that right, but meaning the leader of a chorus. So Paul was the chief dupe and imposter. And he says, the first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus. If you asked Mr. Jefferson what he thought of the apostle Paul, I think he'd tell you, he didn't care for him so much. Unfortunately, that is not all that uncommon of an opinion of Paul, specifically. We might sometimes hear someone call themselves a red-letter Christian. And what they mean by that is, at least they would claim, to agree with and base their beliefs on just the words of Jesus, or the words that are in the red ink in a red-letter edition of the Bible. The rest of the stuff, the things in black letters, they would say they hold more loosely or don't pay that much attention to because they can be in contradiction of some of the red letter parts, they think. Now, someone who says that, if they actually were to read all of the red lettered words, I'm pretty sure they would find they don't like many of them as well. I've heard others. who will say that they like and agree with the Bible generally, people who claim to be Christians, but they just really don't care for Paul and some of the things that Paul wrote. Well, if you've ever had that thought, if you've ever come across someone who makes those kinds of claims, the letter from Paul to the Galatians is a good place to go to sort that out. because Paul wrote this letter partly for that reason. There were people claiming that what Paul taught was contradictory to what Jesus taught. Contradictory to what the other apostles that came before Paul taught. And really this is people making these accusations who thought that they had the authority to determine truth. And people who read the Bible like that who say, I agree with this part, but not this part, believe they are in a position where they have the authority to determine truth. These accusers of Paul believed that what Paul taught should be rejected because it was wrong. You believe what Jesus said, but not Paul. There is a big problem with that way of thinking. And Paul is going to show us that in the verses that we're looking at today. Galatians 1, verses 10 through 24. What we see here is Paul defending himself against the false accusations made by the Judaizers about Paul so that they could discredit the gospel he preached. In the book of 2 Corinthians, there's another time when Paul was forced to defend himself. And he makes it pretty clear there in 2 Corinthians that he hates to have to do that. If you've ever been put in a position where you have to defend yourself, you can probably feel what Paul was feeling. He didn't want to defend himself. He doesn't want to make any of this about him. He wants all the focus to be on Christ. But because There's false teachers who are trying to lead people astray by tearing Paul down so they can discredit the gospel he preached. He doesn't really have a choice. He has to defend himself. But the way he does it is by making it clear that it's not about him. And he shines the light back on Jesus Christ. So let's look, beginning in verse 10, Galatians chapter one. Verse 10, Paul says, For am I now seeking the favor of men or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ." Judging by what Paul says here in verse 10, apparently some of the accusation was that Paul was adjusting the message he preached depending on the hearers. Sometimes he would preach one thing, other times he would preach something else, so he could be a man pleaser. Gentiles, who were largely making up the churches in Galatia, would not be too keen on the idea of having to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to be saved. That's not their thing. That's the Jewish thing. They can have it. The Gentiles wouldn't like it. So in order to please the Gentiles, the Judaizers claimed, to get more Gentile support, more followers for Paul, he left that part out. Paul is asking rhetorically, could that be the case? If you're looking at the situation honestly, is that even possible? Am I now seeking the favor of men? or of God. As you look at this situation, am I striving to please men? Just think about the beatings, the opposition that Paul received in those cities of Galatia. One time he was nearly stoned to death. Was that to please men? If he was trying to be a man pleaser, He wasn't doing a very good job of it, because he had a lot of enemies. On the contrary, it was God who he was trying to please. He was doing what he did for God's glory. He received the opposition and the beatings, being stoned nearly to death, for God's glory, not his own. If Paul wanted to Just make life easy for himself. There are a lot of ways he could have done a lot better job of that than he was doing. But that wasn't his goal. And it shouldn't have been. Paul said to Timothy, at a time when Timothy needed to be reminded of the same kind of thing, 2 Timothy 4, verses 1-4, I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead by his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. But wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. To be a faithful witness for Christ, to be a faithful Christian, a faithful preacher of God's Word, there are going to be times when we have to say things. We have to take a stand on things that are not popular and may not be well received. Some things we may have to say and take a stand on that may be completely counter-cultural. We may lose friends. We may gain enemies. But that's how it is when we won't compromise the truth. That's always been the case. As time goes on, it becomes even more so. People want to hear what they want to hear. It can be tempting to want to give it to them. To be the ear-tickler. To be popular. To be liked. But Paul says, that's not him. That's not his intention. That's not his goal in life. At least, not anymore. You look again at the end of verse 10. He says, if I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ. And Paul says, That used to be his intention. That used to be his desire back before he was saved. But that all changed when he became a bondservant of Christ. Now it's that background, how he used to be, the change that happened in his life, it gives evidence, it gives proof that the message he preached was the truth and not something he just came up with to try to please men. We can go on in verses 11 and 12. He says, For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. This message that Paul preached when he went to Galatia of salvation by grace, apart from the works of the law, apart from the works of man, where did that come from? Well, Paul says there is no question. This cannot even be debated. This is something you need to know. None of this has a human source. That's not where it came from. It did not come from any mere man. It was not influenced by man. It can't be judged as good or bad, right or wrong by man. Because it is not of man. So if you don't like it, even if nobody likes it, Paul's not going to change it. Because it's not a message that is measured by man's standards. So again, where did it come from? That's the question. Where did this message come from? At the end of verse 12, I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. I said the same last week. If someone disagrees with what Paul taught, they're not disagreeing with Paul. They're disagreeing with Jesus Christ. Because that's where this message came from. It wasn't Paul's idea. It's Christ's message. To give proof of that, Paul does something that's pretty unique to Galatians compared to the rest of his letters. He's going to share his testimony. Paul had to do that a few times. It's recorded in the book of Acts. As he defended himself before various prosecutors and kings and rulers, he had to share his testimony. Not necessarily he had to, but it was a way of proclaiming the truth by telling what happened to him. He gets pretty detailed about his testimony here in Galatians, especially considering how relatively short this book is. It's a pretty detailed story about his life. His testimony starts in verse 13, and it basically goes through chapter 2. We're not going to look at all of it this morning, but a good chunk of it anyway through the rest of chapter 1. This is a good opportunity to get to know the Apostle Paul and get to know the gospel of grace that he preached and why it was the only message he could preach. So he begins, where any good testimony begins, with his life before salvation. Verse 13, for you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism. how he used to persecute the Church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it. Now the argument of the Judaizers was that Paul was wrongly taking the Judaism part out of the gospel. The law being circumcised. That's the Judaism part of the gospel. Paul was excluding that. But Paul had shared his testimony while he was in those places in Galatia. He apparently did that quite often. And they knew who he used to be. That everything for him had been about Judaism. He was so much in favor of Judaism that he thought it was his duty to destroy anything that seemed to be in opposition or standing in the way of born Judaism. And that's why he was a persecutor of the church. He thought the church was against Judaism. And so he persecuted it beyond measure. He tried to destroy it because it was against Judaism. So could he be guilty of trying to downplay the importance of Judaism now just to please man when that's what he used to live for? Would he be trying to go easy the Gentiles who are part of these churches that he planted and gained their favor when it had been his intention to destroy the church? Does that make sense? Well that is when Paul was busy being a man pleaser and he was really good at it. Paul was climbing the ladder of success as a Pharisee He was on his way to being the top dog in Judaism. And whatever that would have looked like, I don't think he would have been a chief priest because he was from the tribe of Benjamin, not Levi. Maybe he would have been the president of the Sanhedrin if they had that, I'm not sure. But he might have been the most powerful Jew in Israel if he kept going the way he was going. He was on his way there. the ancestral traditions. Paul was extremely zealous for those. That kind of thing was more important than breathing for Jews like Paul. If their ancestors had been circumcised and kept the ceremonies of the law, Paul would have died before he encouraged someone to not follow those traditions. That's the kind of man he was. So what changed? Paul was converted and became a follower of Christ. Verses 15 and 16. But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. Now remember, the overall question here is where did this gospel come from that Paul preached? Clearly, Paul didn't make it up on his own, considering the trajectory he was on as a Jew. And to prove that he wasn't convinced of this by any man, consider his conversion. Think about how Paul was saved. The detailed account of this is found in Acts chapter 9. I encourage you to turn there for a little bit. Acts chapter 9. We're going to read verses 1 through 9 of Acts chapter 9. As we read this, you see the name Saul. Keep in mind that that's the Hebrew name of the equivalent Paul, his Greek name. Same man. had these same names probably his whole life, Saul and Paul. Here he is referred to as Saul. Verse 1, Acts 9. Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priests and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now stop there for just a second. Damascus is about a six day journey from Jerusalem. So apparently some big things were happening in Damascus that Paul would go all that way. Just before this in Acts, we looked at a few weeks ago, there was a great persecution began after the murder of Stephen. All kinds of Christians were fleeing from Jerusalem. Apparently quite a few of them headed toward Damascus. And so Paul made his way there to bring them back. continue trying to destroy the church. Verse three, as he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him, and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting, but get up and enter the city, and it will be told you what you must do. The men who traveled with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one. Saul got up from the ground. Though his eyes were open, he could see nothing. And leading him by the hand, they brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank." Well, Jesus then sent a Christian to him by the name of Ananias to give him some instructions. Ananias was hesitant at first. He'd heard of Paul. He knew what a murderous, angry man he was. But Jesus said this about Paul, verses 15 and 16. But the Lord said to him, Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for my name's sake. God had a plan for Paul's life. Sometimes you hear people say God has a wonderful plan for your life. God's plan for Paul's life was about how much he was gonna suffer for his name's sake. And this plan, as Paul said back in Galatians 1.15, it goes clear back even before he was born. God's plan for him. And we might think, as awful of a man as Paul was, the way he was being toward the church, he should have been in big trouble with God. He should have been dealt with very severely by God. That's what he deserved. But instead, God showed him grace. Paul didn't become an apostle because he had done anything to deserve it. It was actually the opposite. He deserved hell. And that's part of how Paul knew the gospel of salvation, by grace alone, was the right message. It was the truth, because that's how he was saved. It was by grace alone. He deserved death. He deserved judgment. He deserved condemnation. But God gave him grace. God had a plan for how he was going to use him, even before he was born. And so since God had that plan for Paul, even before he was born, he used the way Paul was brought up. He used his background, his learning, in the ways that Paul served the Lord when he became saved. Paul could debate with the best of the Jews. He probably knew the scriptures, the Hebrew scriptures, better than most of them because of the way he'd been brought up. Paul knew all about trusting in the works of the law for salvation because he had been there. That's what he had been trusting in. He'd had first-hand experience of being saved from that by grace. Because when he was actually saved, that's how he was saved. By grace. apart from works. There's nothing he had done that earned him a bit of acceptance with God. All of his hard work had actually put him in opposition to God, not brought him closer. He was trying to stand in the way of God's grace and what God was doing when God brought His grace. So it was only through His grace that God was pleased to reveal His Son in Paul so that he would preach Christ among the Gentiles. So again, where did the Gospel of Grace come from that Paul preached? Well, obviously, Paul didn't come up with it on his own, because it's the opposite of how he used to think. He learned it by being saved by grace himself. when he met Jesus, and the trajectory of his life was completely changed through grace, through knowing Jesus Christ. Even following his conversion, there's more proof that salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, is not something that any man came up with. The end of verse 16, Paul said that after he became a believer in the resurrected Christ, He did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. He was long way from Jerusalem at this time when it happened. He didn't track someone down, didn't find anyone to run through the details to get any of what just happened confirmed to him or explain it from a human perspective. It was Ananias that went and found him. He didn't do it. He didn't explain the gospel to him, Jesus did. In verse 17, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus. Now there are a few more details if we go back and forth between Galatians and Acts that we won't do this morning, but we could find in Acts more of what happened during that time There's some disagreement about which Arabia he meant. He went into Arabia. Now, some think that it's what we know of today as Saudi Arabia, the region that would include Mount Sinai. And some point out, well, that would be kind of appropriate, wouldn't it be, if God took him back to where the law had been proclaimed to show him that the law is not the way of salvation? Others think it was the region known as Arabia to the east and northeast of Damascus. Which, what I looked at, that kind of makes sense to me because of where he was at the time. That was a desert. And so is the other Arabia. So either way, it was desert. Paul went off to be alone. And that's the point that he's making here. He went off to be alone. It's believed that it was during that time, three years of near isolation, that God revealed to Paul the truth that he was going to be teaching and the truth that he was going to be writing in these letters that we have in our Bible. So where did the gospel come from that Paul preached? It still wasn't from any man. Verse 18. Then three years later, I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him 15 days. But I did not see any other of the apostles except James, the Lord's brother. Now what I am saying to you, I assure you before God, I am not lying." Paul knew, sadly, that some would respond, yes, sure, Paul. Likely story. What probably actually happened was that you just heard parts of the gospel from the apostles when you met with them, but you didn't pay attention to it very well because you didn't get it all. Or you didn't take good enough notes. Or you only heard the parts that you wanted to hear. You didn't want to believe it all so that you could be a man pleaser. Sure, Paul, we believe you. So Paul, he takes an oath here. He's promising you. This is exactly how it happened. After three years, that finally Paul went to Jerusalem. He only spent 15 days there. Three years after he got saved. It was only to get acquainted with Peter, Cephas. Same guy, different names. None of the other apostles or church leaders were even there at the time, other than James, the brother of Jesus. Now, when you think about what he's saying here, hearing the gospel from Peter or James wouldn't have necessarily been a bad thing, because they believed the same gospel of grace. They were preaching the same gospel. But the point is, Paul didn't even get it from them. Wouldn't have been a bad place to get it, but he didn't even get it from them. It came directly from God. You read the rest of the chapter. It says, then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea, which were in Christ. But only they kept hearing, he who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith which he once tried to destroy. And they were glorifying God because of me. Well, after his very brief 15-day stay in Jerusalem, Paul left to go back to where he was from originally. You hear of Saul of Tarsus. Tarsus is in Cilicia. He went back home. He wasn't in Judea long enough for the churches there to even recognize his face. He didn't hear the gospel from them. They knew about him, but they didn't know him. What they knew from what they heard caused them to glorify God. What they heard was, he's preaching the gospel of grace. The guy who used to try to destroy the church is now preaching the gospel of grace. They're praising God for the gospel that Paul was preaching. But it wasn't from those churches that Paul got the gospel he preached. Back to verse 12. He says, For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. He has all this evidence to prove it. So if you disagree with what Paul taught, you're not disagreeing with Paul. You're not disagreeing with any man. Thomas Jefferson thought he didn't like Paul, but it was not Paul that he didn't like. It was the Lord Jesus Christ that he didn't like, sadly. Paul was just the messenger to deliver the message Jesus gave him to deliver. If we proclaim the need of every man, woman, and child to repent and to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ alone for salvation from their sins, to be saved from the punishment, the wrath of God that their sins deserve, Their salvation can only be had by grace alone. We proclaim that there is nothing that anyone can do to earn or deserve any part of their salvation, but believe on the Lord Jesus Christ alone. If someone doesn't like that message, they reject us for proclaiming it. It's not us they're rejecting. It's Jesus. This isn't our message. It's His. He gave it to us in His Word. We're just His messengers. So you face opposition, don't give up. It's not you they're opposing. Don't be discouraged. It's not you they reject. It's Jesus. That's sad for them. That should be our response when we are rejected or ridiculed for the gospel we proclaim. We should feel sorry for them. This is not us they're rejecting. It's Jesus. Carry on. Preach the gospel. Love the people. But don't be afraid of them. This is Jesus's message. We'll look at that more next week, Lord willing.