Now we're turning to Paul's letter to the Galatians. This will be the first of the series for the term. And you will find there are some notes on your desk. Galatians, the gospel for our time, these ones are headed. I'm not going to go through those notes line by line, nor will I go through the other Galatians commentary line by line. I want us to be able to be free to relate to the text as it stands and dip in and out of these things and also make other comments along the way. But those things that I've mentioned here, these set of notes, the other commentaries that I've already mentioned are all resources for you. The other thing that you may be interested in doing in order to bolster your learning in Galatians is to download a series back a few years ago. I preached through Galatians in our own congregation. And if you just type Coromandel Baptist into your search engine and follow the links through to where all of the sermons from Coromandel Baptist are stored, on that website there you'll be able to find a whole series on Galatians. And you might like to have something like that in your mind as you're going through. There's also a series here, I think, on tapes. I don't know if they've been put onto MP3. And what I'm saying in all of that is that sometimes you need to immerse yourself in a book, or you need to immerse yourself in the pattern of thinking that is represented in that book. And during this term, I'd encourage you to read through Paul's letter to the Galatians a number of times, but in order to make yourself less familiar with it in a way, or not just go down a familiar path in it, try and read it a few times in a different translation each time. because different translations will suddenly bring something else to your mind that you hadn't seen before, because in Galatians we actually have a very distilled and very applied compendium of some of the main themes in the Apostle Paul's theology. and you can't really understand Galatians without understanding the themes that connect to so many of Paul's other writings elsewhere. So if you immerse yourself in it by reading, by reading about it, by listening, Those themes sort of build themselves out into the wider Pauline corpus as we speak about it, the wider collection of Paul's letters. And those themes then you find act as a pattern by which you can understand all of Paul's theology. So we access a whole theological structure through Galatians And in Galatians we find that structure just brought down to its most succinct and applied form. But even saying that, Galatians is not there as a theological systematized textbook. And none of Paul's theology was armchair theology. None of it was written speculatively. All of it's written in the real cut and thrust of life. And so what I hope will happen as we go through this letter to the Galatians is that our hearts will be set on fire by what God has, through the Holy Spirit, caused Paul to write to these Galatian Christians. Now, with all of that in mind, we're going to pray and then go into our first study. Father, we thank you that you have caused men like the Apostle Paul to write the things that they have been moved under your Spirit to write, in that they all bear testimony to your Son, and in bearing testimony to your Son, they bear testimony to your grace, our Father, who has sent your Son into the world. And by your Spirit, we need our eyes to be opened. We cannot understand these things unless they are taught by the Spirit, and we cannot access them just through our normal intellectual processes. So we cry out to you, our Father, at the outset of this morning, but also at the outset of this whole series, that you would visit us in your own personal presence, that you would visit us by your spirit, that you yourself, our Father, would come and that in the ministry that you yourself bring to us, this wonderful letter before us may be a living letter that might transform our hearts and lives and minds. and might just liberate us into the glorious freedom of the liberty that you have granted your children in Christ. So, Father, let us live and move in these things with great enjoyment, but also, Father, with a great sense that we are speaking about things which eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, but by your Spirit you make them known. So come, our Father, and be gracious to us in these days, we ask in Jesus' name. Amen. Right, so please turn to Galatians chapter 1. Paul, an apostle, not sent from men nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead. And all the brethren who are with me to the churches of Galatia, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, so that he might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever, or forever and more, or forever and ever. Amen. For I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who has called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is not really another, only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, he is to be accursed. As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, he is to be accursed. 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. So Paul jumps straight in, doesn't he? He's right into the meat of what he's wanting to be about. And this introduction tells us a number of things. Firstly, it tells us that this letter was written to a group of churches, as was the pattern in many of the New Testament letters. A letter would be sent to one church that would be then read in other churches. Letters that had been sent to other churches were circulated to others. And so the churches were always under the instruction either directly or by letter or in other ways, always under the instruction of the apostles who were watching over them eagerly as shepherds of the flock. And so this letter was probably a circular letter, one that Paul had sent to a central location and that letter was then to be passed around. And it seems clear that within this group of churches, and if you look in that commentary you'll see a bit of a discussion about where those groups of churches were and what significance that makes to the dating of the letter. We don't need to go into any of that there, now that's all there for you. But if you look at what Paul's saying at the beginning of this letter, he's saying that this group of churches have in fact been infected by something which has come in with great power and persuasiveness to lead them astray from the gospel that in fact heard from Paul. Now we're going to need, we will need to, and we'll spend some time talking about the nature of that era which had come in. It had come down from the central church at Jerusalem, it seems, by people who had taken under their own authority to move amongst some of these congregations, and they had brought with them a gospel which, chapter and verse-wise, they could point to lines in the text of the Old Testament that could say, what you're hearing from Paul is not the full story and there's other things that you need to add to that. And it was so persuasive that even Peter and Barnabas were persuaded by it for a time. So don't let any of us think that we're in a situation where we can never be led astray by the Galatian heresy. We might not have the same issues that they have. None of us here have had pressure put on us, I would think, in the last couple of years to be circumcised. I don't think that's the sort of pressure that we have put on us in our churches. But the principle that is embodied in that, you will find emerging again and again and again in the life of the people of God. So Paul is very urgent in his appeal to them because he needs them not to be driven aside by this gospel which looks so appealing and he needs them to come back to the apostolic gospel, that gospel which he knows he's been commissioned to preach from Christ and which he's seen in his earlier ministry amongst them they had received with great joy. But he says a little bit later in the letter, what's happened to all of your joy, or what's happened to the sense of blessing, another way of translating it, or what's happened to the sense of happiness that you had. Because as they were moving away from the gospel that Paul had brought to them to something else, one of the first marks of that was that their joy started to evaporate. their love started to go, they started to wither up inside, they started to withdraw from one another on the basis of judgments they were making about one another, they started to withdraw into a shell of self-righteousness. And whenever you're in that shell, you'll find there's no joy, there's no love, there's no peace, there's no openness of relationship to anyone, but what you do find instead emerging amongst The church and in your own heart are things like wrath and bitterness and clamor and judgmentalism. Not that you would have ever experienced any of those things in your heart, I'm sure. Certainly not in the congregations that you're part of. So, stop laughing. So this letter is a letter for our time. It's a gospel for our time. I need to make just a very brief comment about the fact that Paul's letter to the Galatians as well as his letter to the Romans has been subject to a lot of re-analysis over the last 15 or 20 years in New Testament scholarship. And the reanalysis is telling us that the traditional way of interpreting some of Paul's categories, particularly his category or his vocabulary of justification, justification by grace through faith, needs to be modified. There are various people who are saying, for various reasons which we won't go into now, that Luther in particular was wrong, that he read this letter to the Galatians and Romans through the lens of his own interior crisis, and while what he came to was helpful because of that interior crisis, that message that he has interpreted Paul as saying is actually not what Paul was saying. And then a little bit further on, a generation later, there was a man called John Calvin. He was trained as a lawyer and Calvin is said in some senses to have taken that distortion even further because Calvin thought with legalistic categories and Paul's language of justification is not to be understood in that way. Now there's a huge theological debate there that I'm not going into because we would spend the whole term talking about that instead of the text of scripture itself. I make some allusion to that, not illusion, but allusion to that in the first set of the notes and if you turn to the second page of the notes, you'll see three very brief things by way of response. And those briefings, I think, help us to see that that realignment or reinterpretation that is being suggested may not be as strong as it has been argued in some places. Jesus knew what he had come to do was both fulfillment and transformation. He was going to fulfill the Old Testament but he was also going to transform something new. So the new covenant community, the last sentence of that first bullet point under three very brief things, the new covenant community is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ himself being the cornerstone. You actually have to stand in Christ and read your Old Testament that way. You have to stand in Christ and read the Gospels that way. Because if you don't stand in Christ and read the Gospels that way, Christ will condemn you even more than the law of Moses. You have to know Christ as your Saviour, otherwise you won't be able to read the Sermon on the Mount without coming away with utter condemnation for every thought, motive, intention and action that you've ever done. Which is part of why the Sermon on the Mount is there. It's not to tell us how to be good Christians, it's to tell us why we need a saviour. And what flows from that is being in Christ truly in accordance with the law which is Paul's, as Paul speaks about it in Galatians chapter 5, the law of love. But you need to stand actually in Christ as a justified person to read the Old Testament, to read even the Sermon on the Mount. There was an apostolic gospel created through Christ, crystallized on the day of Pentecost that had never existed before. Now we cannot overlook that statement. When Peter stood up to proclaim, he was proclaiming something that had never been said before. And various people who were wanting to highlight the strong continuity between the Old Testament and very strong continuity between Judaism and Christianity, I think in some measure do not give sufficient weight to the fact that when Peter preached, he preached something that no one had ever preached before. And when Paul preached, he preached something that he had never preached before as a loyal Orthodox Jewish Pharisee. The third thing is that the conversion of people like Saul, as Paul's name was before the Damascus Road, there are various people who will suggest that what happened on the Damascus Road was not a conversion so much as just an expanding of Paul's vision. From one point of view, every conversion is an expanding of your vision, but Paul came to a different place. He comes to a place that he was not in before. A conversion of people like Saul means that whatever the roots of Israel from which it came, it was clearly different from the best that Jewish spirituality could produce. Paul makes much of his own conversion in Galatians and some other places, like when he's speaking to Felix or Agrippa. And it is the proof of three things. God still has a purpose for his own Old Testament people. He's not given up on them completely. Even if there's a partial hardening for a while, Paul is part of a first fruits harvest yet to come of the Jews. Now he argues that very strongly in Romans chapter 9 to 11. The work of God in conversion is a work of grace. All that Paul was in himself, especially in his religious zeal, was utterly opposed to the gospel, and he could never simply change his mind. He had to become the object of grace. And thirdly, it also means that what Paul once was as Saul was not sufficient for the conversion of the nations, which is the end point of the gospel's proclamation in this age. When the New Testament communities were founded, for example, at Antioch, they were not Jewish with modified theology. Cultural meltdown took place and the great barrier of the dividing wall was broken down. When you see a New Testament community like that at Antioch, It was not as though the Jews were doing things in a slightly modified Jewish way. The Jews and the Gentiles, those who had been pagan idolaters and those who had been loyal, law-keeping Jews, were worshipping in the spirit and in truth in a very different way, learning and encouraging one another in very different things, from a very different heart. It was neither Greek nor Jewish. It was a new creation in Christ. The two have become one new man, and in a very real sense we have to understand that there are three groups. There's Jews and Gentiles, and a Christian is a member of a new community. A Christian is, as one of the British commentators said many years ago, whose name escapes me, Christians are the third race. Do not think of yourself as a Gentile. Do not even think of yourself as a converted Gentile. Do not think of yourself as a Jew or a converted Jew. Think of yourself as a Christian. Because a Christian is someone in Christ who has some sense of continuity with where they come from. But in Christ, if any man is in Christ, he's a new creation. And there is just one new humanity in Christ. Now, all that I've just alluded to in those brief comments belong to a huge debate, but I just needed to touch on that so that you know that that debate is out there, so that if you're reading wider in Paul's theology or Paul's letter to the Galatians, you can understand why some people are saying that Luther and Calvin and others in that Reformation tradition have misunderstood Paul. What you're going to find in this class is that I'm going to stick with Luther and Calvin on the way through because I do think they have given true and good interpretation of what happened to Paul on the Damascus Road and have understood in very good measure the structure of Paul's theology. but you need to know if you're going to do any wider reading and study that that wider debate is out there and sometimes is talked about under a heading called the New Perspective on Paul. So let's now move into the more edifying part of what we need to be about and that is this introduction itself. Paul an Apostle. Paul an Apostle. From one sense, in one sense, you and I and every Christian is apostolical because you hear an apostolical gospel, you live by an apostolical gospel and you proclaim an apostolical gospel and that apostolical gospel is the means by which God has appointed the nations to be brought to himself. But none of us here is an apostle in the same way that Paul and Peter and James and John were apostles. Well, James wasn't, but Paul and Peter and John were apostles. An apostle stood at the nexus of two ages. An apostle stood with the full history of God's Old Testament, as we call it, God's Hebrew Bible, God's Jewish history, summed up in those books, beating in his heart and mind, but he stood as a person in Christ, who interpreted the whole of that Old Testament through Christ, and interpreted everything about Christ through that Old Testament. And out of that nexus, you have a New Testament. Now, we have letters in the New Testament written by the apostles. Now, there are many, many, many fine books that have been written by many good people. We've just got one or two of them around the shelves here. But none of those will ever get a place in the Scriptures, will they? They're all flowing from that apostolic revelation and if they're going to have any lasting value, they will be an expression of that apostolical revelation. But Paul here is speaking of himself as an apostle in the way that we cannot speak of ourselves as an apostle. He has received a direct commission from Christ to preach Christ amongst the Gentiles. And if ever a man was perfectly equipped to understand what needed to be preached, it was Paul. You could say that's good luck, but that would be very unbiblical, because we are told that Paul had been set apart from his mother's womb. He needed to be born when he was born. He needed to be brought up in Tarsus where he was brought up. He needed to have all of the Pharisaic background that he had. He needed to have had the experience of persecuting the church which he'd had. He'd needed to watch Stephen die by stoning while he was giving approval. He needed to be filled with all of the rage and zeal and anger that was in his heart before Christ met him. He needed all of that in order to understand the difference. between the gospel and everything else. And when that revelation of Christ exploded within his heart, he was immediately launched in the power of the Spirit to a word that he proclaimed immediately in Damascus and then in Arabia and other places. And when that proclamation took place, it was as though God had set loose on the world a force that was going to transform the nations, not in Paul's strength, but in Paul's weakness. Because everything he'd done up until that point was in his strength. But when that Word comes to us in the midst of our weakness, and you understand it is the Word of Christ for the nations, then your weakness is not a barrier. The Word of God prolongs and declares itself through the midst of jars of clay which leak all over the place and crack and break down very readily. But that Word of Christ goes on. And Paul was uniquely chosen by God, shaped by God, equipped by God, filled with the Spirit of Christ in order to proclaim Christ like no other man could in his day or age. And so when Paul speaks of himself as an apostle, he's very aware that that calling was something given to him which was for the foundation of the church. Church which is built on the foundation of the Apostles and the Prophets. And in these opening verses he makes quite something of the fact that that commission has been given to him direct by Christ. Now that's not Paul being boastful. It's Paul needing to set his gospel in the context of what is being said by others who've come down from Jerusalem. So many of our New Testament letters, indeed all of them, that's many of them, are like listening to one side of a telephone conversation. you sort of can work out what's being said on the other side of the telephone conversation by the replies or the answers or the silences sometimes on this side, by the things which are just skipped over briefly because you don't need to make anything of them, by the things that are given more attention. And so in Galatians, you're listening to Paul's reply to an issue that has emerged with certain people having come down But those people who've come down have made much of the authority by which they have come down. They have arrogated to themselves the authority of the church at Jerusalem and they have said to the people to whom they are ministering in these Galatian congregations that you need to listen to us because we've got great weight behind us, the church at Jerusalem is with us, James and those who've stayed at Jerusalem. As for this Paul, Where does he fit? How do you know that his word's reliable? I mean, what pedigree does he have? If you look at him, most of the time he's out and about, he's travelling all over the known world, and a lot of the time, places that he goes end up in strife. He's not a very reliable fellow. Never know whether he's going to turn up or not when he says so, and if you look at him, his life is often full of suffering, and probably he's suffering because he's actually been disobedient to God. You know, you just read between the lines. But if you listen to what we're saying, you'll actually be back on the true track. Paul's actually been okay. What he's told you has been okay. You've needed that to get you started. But now that you're started, you really need to come home to the center. And what we're telling you is going to bring you home to the center and let just Paul go. And Paul at the very outset has to say, no, no, there's an authority with which I speak which has come from Christ himself. And as he unfolds this opening, he makes it very clear that that authority is not by virtue of office. Now the whole of the Roman world lived by authority that was by virtue of office. If you look at most places in the world that have got a civilised, settled government at least, authority proceeds by virtue of office. But where authority proceeds by virtue of office, it can be independent of what that official says. The authority that Paul has is entirely bound up with his message. You notice in the latter part of that introduction, if I come back or an angel from heaven comes and they preach to you a gospel which you've not heard, don't listen to me. I don't take my apostolic authority from the fact that I have been commissioned as an apostle. It's not as though someone's laid hands on me and I've laid hands on someone and someone else has laid hands on someone and therefore the apostolic office confirms everything I say. No, what I say confirms what I am. The office does not confirm the person, the message confirms the ministry. Now that's really important for us because sometimes we can get ourselves into the situation where we're more focused on the messenger of the gospel than the gospel. And as was the case when people wanted to take away from the message of any of God's servants, they could point to the fault of God's servants. Every one of them, just think through the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Thank God we're not like them, hey. King David. We can look at the messengers of the gospel, And the faults and failures and cracks and inconsistencies and imperfections and flaws may mar us to the fact that that messenger may be in the situation where the message is even more validated. Can you see what I'm saying in that? You need a message of grace. The only thing that's going to set your heart free is a message of grace. And if a person like a Pharisee lives as a Pharisee, you'll never hear a message of grace from a Pharisee, because the Pharisees don't need grace. They've just got it so much together. So the message validates the messenger, not the other way around. Now, when Paul therefore is saying, if I or another person or even an angel from heaven come and preach a gospel that's contrary to what you've heard, he's saying don't place your confidence in the appearance of glory or not. This ties in with a wider debate and a wider issue that Paul has to face in his pastoral care of the churches. In the Corinthian letters it comes through very clearly. You had a group of people who had come amongst the Corinthians saying, look at us. We're healthy, we're wealthy, we're wise, we're full of honour, we've got glory, we've got a retinue that travels with us, we've got authority where we go, we've got letters of commendation. Look at Paul. Most of the time he's sort of marginalized, he's suffering, often he's in prison. Seems sometimes that he's just abandoned. Can't believe that God's really pleased with Paul, can you? I mean, we've got the evidence to show that God's pleased with us. You could come and join us and you could have the same sort of evidence that we've got. I mean, everyone wants to be healthy, wealthy, prosperous and wise and full of honor, don't they? So the question about how a person is received hinges on the message, not the appearance of the messenger. In the Galatian occasion, the Galatian situation, the people who had come down from Jerusalem were saying certain things about Paul and his manner and his pattern of life and the way in which he seemed not to be consistent on certain issues, like One place, he got Timothy circumcised. Another place, he says, if you tear-touch Titus, you're going to compromise the whole Gospel. I mean, how can you trust a word like that? It does one thing in one place, another thing in another place. It's completely contradictory. No, it's not contradictory. The unity is in the grace. The unity is in the grace that allows one thing to be so in one place and a completely contrary thing to be so in another place, and both are true in grace. has to, against his own wishes, I would believe, he has to present his apostolic authority as a freestanding apostolic authority, given directly by Christ, on the basis of his commission to preach Christ, and he's very self-effacing in the fact that he knows if he is not preaching Christ, then his apostolic ministry will have no authority and should not be listened to. It is not bound up with his person. Somewhere in the notes you will find a quote from Martin Luther where he says, the message approves the messenger, not the other way around. The message approves the messenger, not the other way around. Now, Paul therefore is going to focus very much on the message in this letter. And he gives us a potted indication of what that message is in verses 3 and 4. Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and peace. Grace was a word which was present in the Greek language of the day. It was a concept that was known across the Greco-Roman world, but it did not mean what the apostles mean by grace. Grace in the common language meant something like gracefulness, gentleness, politeness, liveness of form and movement, sophistication of the way one went about something, elegance. That's not what Paul means by grace. When Paul means grace, he means a power that converts. He means the power of God unleashed on the world to transform men and women from the ground up, from their heart, to turn them inside out and upside down and turn the world upside down. Grace in Paul and the other apostles takes on a new meaning. and they pack that word, it's like the word agape, the word for love, they take a word which in some way is on the fringe of the Greek dictionary, pull it into the centre of their thought and just pour a whole sort of new meaning into it. So grace is the action of God in his own love and holiness to freely bestow upon us that which we have not earned. It's the action of God in his own holy love to freely bestow upon us that which we've not earned. We sometimes have words like grace and mercy and while as I said on Sunday morning in our congregation it's a little bit simplistic, you could think about it this way, grace grants to us freely that which we have never earned. Mercy delivers us from getting that which we deserve. And Christians are the objects of grace in that in the holy love of God he freely bestows upon us that which we have never earned and can never earn and we are the objects of God's mercy in that we are freely removed from the judgment which we deserve, we do not get what you deserve, you get contrary to what you deserve in Christ, grace and mercy. But that grace that comes to us puts us in a relationship of peace. Peace, wherever you read it in Paul, is peace with God first and foremost, And when it's peace with God, it is then secondarily peace within your own heart, and then peace with one another, but there's no peace within your own heart unless there's peace with God, and there's no peace with God unless God makes peace with us. It does not lie within the human heart for us to make peace with God. Paul expounds that very fully in his letter to the Romans, and he shows us in the opening chapters that we do not have it within ourselves to make peace with God, not because we do not have the ability, well we do not have the ability, but we do not have the disposition, we hate God, we are not going to reconcile to God because of the hostility that we have towards Him, and the law condemns us all, he argues in the first chapters of Romans, to show us that that place in which we stand is indefensible and it is a place under which we can never know peace because it is a place whereby the wrath of God is manifest and if there is going to be peace it has to be by a work of God by which he freely justifies us, by which he freely grants to us in Christ that which we haven't earned, by which he freely bestows upon us the mercy which does not give us that which we deserve, and so in Romans Paul says, therefore having been justified by faith we have peace with God. So in Romans chapter 5 verse 1, now here in Galatians he says grace and peace to you, grace that whole action of God freely bestowing on us in Christ that which we've not earned, gives us peace with God and that grace and peace comes from the Father. Because Paul's going to make a lot about, a lot of the fact that the purpose of redemption in Galatians is not simply that you would be saved from something, but that you would be liberated to know God as Abba. However good Judaism was, however good his Pharisaic religion was, however zealous his devotion was, he never came to know Abba. Could never do so. So it is Abba, the dear Father himself, who grants to us grace and peace from Jesus Christ, through Jesus Christ, with Jesus Christ, in Jesus Christ. You will have no grace and peace from God the Father except it be by the agency of, in union with, and by the work of Jesus Christ. That work is summarized in a very brief sentence in chapter 4, verse 4, who gave himself for our sins so that he might rescue us from this present evil age. Who gave ourselves from our sins that he might rescue us from this present evil age. Galatians chapter 1 verse 4. That tells us that there is an evil age. And we can think very easily that this age is very benign, and this age is not very hostile to the gospel, and in some senses we don't suffer the direct persecution that many people in the church have suffered, but beloved, it is an evil age. But Martin Luther is very insightful because of the way in which this letter addresses the central issue of how we are justified. He speaks about the nature of this evil age in a contrary way. If you have a look at that set of notes, page 3, And you'll see a small number three in brackets, the deliverance that is accomplished is from this present evil age. There's some comparisons there about other places where you can read similar things in John. But then, in particular, last bullet point, how do we relate to the world's goodness? The issue in this letter is that the evil age will present a system of salvation based on how well we can operate with the law to perfect ourselves and others. Luther says this, Paul is correct in calling it the evil world For when it is at its best... I just realised that your page numbers must be different from mine. When it's at its best, then it's at its worst. Now that sort of contradiction is what we have to enter into to understand Galatians. When it's at its best, then it's at its worst. The world is at its best in men who are religious, wise and learned, yet in them it is actually evil twice over. Like evil twice over as it was in the Apostle Paul, where he can really say, according to righteousness which is in the law, I have been found blameless. But that seemed to exclude from his computation the fact that he was complicit in the murder of many people, not least Stephen. So his righteousness was so good and his zeal was so powerful and his passion so strong that he could murder or be complicit in the murder of someone like Stephen and see it actually as obedience to God. So the evil age is not just bound up with dark things like spiritism and spooky stuff. The evil age is even more bound up with really dark things like religion and Christian religion. Yeah, well, Paul was that. But let's not be too hasty to say we would never be a Taliban. If Peter and Barnabas could be led astray, you just need the gospel, don't you, all the time. So, this gospel of the justifying grace of God, built on the only ground of that justification, the death and resurrection of the Son, is the most powerful and liberating thing in the entire world. May we be given heart to hear it. Now those other pages there tell us about the fact that there is just one gospel, This gospel has been manifest in his son, it's the gospel of the free grace of God, that the gospel that the people had brought down from Jerusalem seemed so appealing and so persuasive, but it's really not another gospel, because finally it puts the grounds and confidence of your life somewhere other than Christ. And so where Christ is minimized, where the work of the cross is reduced to something that, oh yes, we already know that, but where the work of what God has done in Christ is minimized in favor of what we have to do by way of response, in all those ways we're starting to slip down the Galatian path. And Paul says to us that the release from this present evil age is by the forgiveness of sins. Now the forgiveness of sins lies at the very heart and center, the sweet foundational core of the New Covenant. I will remember their sins no more. They will all know me from the least of them to the greatest of them because I will remember their sins no more. Paul, as the Apostle, is a servant of a new covenant, and wherever the forgiveness of sins is known, the totality, the completeness, the fullness, the irremediability, just abundant grace of forgiveness is known, then the fruit of the Spirit in new covenant joy comes to us, and the fruit of the Spirit in new covenant love keeps flowing through us, and so it's that gift of forgiveness manifest in Christ which rescues us from the present evil age, even where that present evil age is expressed in its most religiously appealing form. So Paul's going to speak much about the work of forgiveness in this letter. We're going to close in just a moment, but I want to just read one quote to us. This is from, on my system of sheets, the bottom of page 5. It's a quote from someone called Donald MacLeod. It's a comment on legalism. And Donald MacLeod says this, and we'll come back to this in future weeks. Legalism is the idea that we can win acceptance with God on the basis of something that is true about ourselves. This may be something we've done, something we've experienced, something infused into us, or some privilege which distinguishes us from other people. Whatever it is, if it allows us to boast about ourselves before God, it is legalism. If we deemed ourselves justified on the basis of national privilege, it would be legalism. If we deemed ourselves justified on the basis of our own covenant keeping, it would be legalism. Our justification is secured in Christ and by Christ alone. and you will never find anything within yourself that will be a sufficient basis to put your heart at peace on which you can take your stand as a justified person. That quote of Donald MacLeod is really going to infuse everything that we say as we go through the letter to the Galatians. Our time is gone.