Mornings Galatians chapter one, verses six through nine. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble 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 the one we preach to you, let him be a curse. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be a curse. So the text talks about a different gospel or another gospel. I want to give you two examples of another gospel in our own day, and there, of course, are a lot that I could have chosen, but I only picked two. The first example that I'm going to give you eclipses the gospel through deflection. It might be there somewhere, but it doesn't really matter, you see, because there's other things that are more important. Now, this first example needs a little caveat, since I wrote this earlier this week before the events that follow were supposed to come true. So this is my caveat to him, to whom it may concern, if by chance you found this sermon lying there on my printer and can't figure out where I am, I've been raptured. Please disregard the following sermon. I was wrong. But now I'm in heaven and you're not. So maybe you can still get something out of it after all. So keep reading. Sincerely, Doug Van Dorn. Now, that's my caveat. OK, that didn't take place, but I felt they needed to write it down just in case. Now that I have that out of the way on to the story on Tuesday, September 6th, 1994, dozens of believers gathered inside Alameda's Veterans Memorial Building just south of Oakland in California. For two years, they had been preparing for this moment. They were dressed in their Sunday best. See, it didn't really matter that it was a Tuesday and not a Sunday because they were told years earlier that anyone who continued to stay in the church was under the curse of God. So they were dressed in their Sunday's best on this Tuesday. They had their Bibles open face towards heaven and they listened to their modern prophet tell them how in just a few more hours Jesus would take them home to keep them from the hell on earth that was going to be unleashed from heaven the following day. But, of course, that day came and went with nothing unusual, much less supernatural happening. And their profit had miscalculated. He promised that he would return quickly to his magical abacus to discern where his computations had gone wrong. And then, as he did this, he discovered the problem. He had not been taking Noah's flood into account nearly as much as he should have. The flood he now reasoned occurred in fourteen four thousand nine hundred and ninety B.C. And you ask, how did he arrive at such a date? Well, it was through looking at carbon dating and tree rings and other data. Now, the Bible says that Noah's flood came on 17th, the day of the second month, as he was pondering what all of this could possibly mean for our future. It occurred to him that a thousand years is like a day. And he remembered that history is only a total of seven thousand years long. So he crunched the numbers again. And when taken into account the fact that there is no year zero, he was stunned to learn that his previous prediction was 16 years and nine months off. Now, two days ago, as I preached this this morning on Friday, May 20th, 2011, the gospel, according to Family Bible Radio and several cloned prophets of Harold Camping, was the gospel of escapism. Do you hear that? That's the good news. Escape ism. You shall have time to be taken up in the rapture of the church so that you will not have to suffer God's five months of judgment upon planet Earth, followed by the obliteration of the entire universe on October 21st, 2011. Camping's good news has obviously taken the world by storm again, which is really pretty remarkable that he could pull this off twice. All of the major news networks covered the story, and just about everybody I know on Facebook yesterday was putting it up on their site. Last night, Saturday, May 21st, 2011, at precisely 6 p.m., just as predicted, the rapture occurred. Unfortunately for you and I, we missed it so much for the good news. Now we're going to have to suffer God's wrath with everyone else on Earth, but perhaps even worse, camping and his followers missed it, too, because this morning they're all still here. In fact, Jesus didn't take anyone with him in the rapture. Apparently, God is so angry with everyone on Earth. He didn't want to take anyone with him. This shouldn't surprise Mr. Camping, since he himself told us that the church age has been over since the late 1980s and that no one remaining in church after that time can be raptured. Apparently, God considered his radio network more of a church than he was willing to admit. Now, obviously, I'm being sarcastic and I'm not exactly happy with the events that have unfolded the past couple of days. There has been a continuous blatant run in around the explicit words of Christ that no one knows the day or the hour of his return, and it shows that some people throughout the ages will say and believe just about anything except what matters most. Unfortunately, sometimes the things that they believe end up ruining their lives here on Earth and potentially also in heaven. Some of the people who were not taken up last night this morning woke up with the stark reality that they're going to have to figure out a way to deal with the fact that they no longer have any worldly possessions at all because they gave them away to the family Bible radio network that has absolutely no intention of giving them back. They're going to have to start all over. And this time, what do you suppose their attitude is going to be about Jesus Christ and the word of God? Now, the second example is another gospel. That occurred between the years for 1545 and 1563, and this example, the gospel is not obscured, it's actually effaced, it's been destroyed. I'm referring to the Council of Trent, which The Roman Catholic Church says it's an ecumenical council, even though there was no Eastern or Northern European churches to be found at the council. And this is where the Church of Rome shot itself in the foot, leading to a gangrenous poison that she is not able to extract from anyone who holds to her official teaching. On January 13, 1547, the council fathers presented to the world the following official church canons about justification in response to the Protestants who were creating colossal rifts in the church. This is these are quotes now, if anyone says by faith alone, the impious is justified. in such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will let him be anathema. Canon nine. Here's Canon eleven. If anyone says that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ or by the sole remission of sins to the exclusion of the grace and the charity that is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost and is inherent in them, and even that the grace whereby we are justified is only the favor of God, let him be anathema. And one more. This is canon twelve. If anyone says that justifying faith is not nothing else but confidence in divine mercy, which remits sins for Christ's sake, or that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified. Let him be anathema. Now, these canons were meant to strike at the heart of the doctrine of justification, which the reformers believed was the very center of the gospel. And as such, they reflect a newly minted Roman retaliate retaliation gospel, which she had never officially stated or bound to her people until that moment. As one person has summed it up, the gospel of Rome is now faith plus works, grace plus merit, Christ plus the church, baptismal regeneration, penance, the masses, the rosary, indulgences, Mary, the pains of purgatory and so on. Now, to date, Rome has never overturned these canons, though it should be said, and I want to say this, that Vatican two in the decrees on ecumenism in paragraph two. We read Rome say this. The children who are born into schismatic communities and who grew up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the Protestant separation. And the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers with respect and affection. Now, this is a nice sentiment, but it creates a logical contradiction for the Roman Church. She has placed an anathema upon anyone who believes in salvation by faith alone, through grace alone, because of Christ alone. Protestants are supposed to believe that. And yet Rome considers such persons separated brothers. How does that make any sense? Well, the contradiction comes in the use of the word anathema, which also happens to lead me straight into the text this morning. Galatians one six through nine is about a different gospel, and there are many of them today, and it's about the anathema that the apostle places upon those who teach a different gospel. Now, by the end of this sermon, I hope that you will understand good and well what anathema actually means. After the salutation, the first five verses, Paul dives straight into the purpose of his letter, as I told you last week, by bypassing any kind of thanksgiving for these churches. He says, I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and they're turning to a different gospel. The first thing after the salutation, Paul expresses astonishment or bewilderment over the present situation, one of which we know nothing about yet. His astonishment occurs because it has only been a few months or perhaps just a year or two since he first went to them. Now, to think how soon these troubles have come upon these people, let alone their inability To withstand the strong winds of the false doctrines that they were being taught by false teachers. This causes Paul and his cohorts no end of puzzlement. And yet, as Martin Luther points out, Paul does not immediately blast the Galatians saying something like this. A plague of apostasy on you, I am ashamed of you, your ingratitude wounds me, I am angry with you. Now, it's true that Paul does not say that. Nevertheless, Luther goes on to say that Paul is acting with maternal affection and speaking gently to them in these verses, and I think that he's too kind to say this. Paul's next words explain the reason for his astonishment. He says, You are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and you're turning to a different gospel. What they are doing here is the opposite of repentance. Which is a turning away from sin to God. These people are turning away from God towards Satan through acceptance of embracing a different gospel. Now, other gospels lead to destruction, just as the gospel leads to life. The word he uses for deserting here is Really, what I want to focus on for a minute, it could just mean turning away from. But there's precedent in classical Greek for it to refer to something much more sinister. A fellow called Dionysus of Heraclea was actually called Dionysus the Turncoat. Because he was a member of the Stoic school and left them to become a member of the rival Epicurean school. Turncoat is the word that Paul is using here. To the Galatians in military use, it refers to soldiers in an army who desert their army, and this is very much the way that Paul is using the term here, and so referring to the Galatians as ancient time, Benedict Arnold's traitors of Christ is not exactly maternal gentle scolding, I don't think. Quite serious, the language that is. Now, I want you to tuck away when I'm about to say for later in the sermon, I find it interesting that the English verb to desert is related to the noun desert actually spelled the same way to desert is to is to forsake or abandon. And a desert is an abandoned or forsaken place. There's a lot of strange word associations with this in the Bible, for example, I found it curious that an Old Testament word to desert is the word in the fall. And it's used to describe the fallen Gaborim in Ezekiel 32, where the Septuagint says, and they are laid with the giants that fell of old, who went down to Hades with their weapons of war. Or I want you to take this word in the New Testament, it's the word Aramis. which is a word probably borrowed from Mount Hermon, at the base of which was the worship of Pan, who was the son of Hermes. Aramos, Hermon and Hermes are all related etymologically. Now, in a few minutes, you're going to see why I bring this up, and it isn't because I really wanted to, it's because this is really important to what Paul is going to be talking about here in a minute to really understand the significance of the anathema that he's talking about. Who are they turning from and who are they turning to? They're deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ. Paul still says that they're under God's grace. He doesn't call them apostate, but rather they are in the process of apostatizing. Why would they want to? That's really the question that's kind of being answered here. And what Paul is saying is that God has called them. Paul doesn't say that he called them. He says that God did. This is a supernatural calling. Paul does not say that those effectually called will turn away because he's not interested in talking about the theology of effectual calling, which is clear in other places. Instead, he's trying to get them to see that this call comes from above in heaven from God. Just as Paul's own calling to be an apostle came from God, just as the message of the gospel that he preaches comes from heaven as well. And so if that's true, why would they want to turn from it? And this is even truer when considering that this gospel brings grace, he says. They have received what they have not deserved. They've been granted a reprieve of doom, forgiveness of sins, eternal life in Christ. Why would they ever want to give it up? Now, that's the question for all people who would rather be justified by their works. Here, grace is already being set up apart to be the antithesis of the works of the law, which is the very thing that the Galatians are turning towards. God's grace is completely free. It's not something they've earned, merited or worked for. It is simply God's gift to them for turning to Christ, who is the author of the gift. And to desert such grace is to turn your back on God himself. It is to turn to a different gospel. He uses that term. Now, this is the last. Phrase of verse six, and it's caused a lot of people to wonder if there's more than one gospel. It is strange to me that the circles I grew up in, as well as liberals, make strange bedfellows when it comes to this little section of this verse. Dispensationalists have insisted for a long time that the gospel of grace was not preached on planet Earth until Christ revealed this gospel to Paul, who I was growing up hearing. This was called the gospel for the church, which is the great parenthesis and hidden mystery until Pentecost. But they'll say things like Jesus preached another gospel, which they call the gospel of the kingdom. And this gospel was given to the Israelites. This is all. Interesting and kind of strange, but it's. Also, the fact that liberals have followed a similar thinking. They come to Galatians 2.7, for example, and insist that Paul preached a gospel of uncircumcision while Peter preached a gospel of circumcision. And it all seems to be contradicted by the very next words of Paul. Because Paul says not that there is another gospel. That's what the very next thing he says. So he says there's a different gospel, not that there is another gospel. It seems to me pretty clear. One liberal scholar says about this, the apostle seems to deny here the existence of another gospel. But then he goes right on to say that Paul goes on to mention another gospel in two seven. I think that's what you call letting your theological bias color your exegesis. I wonder, is this really so difficult to understand? There is no other gospel, not really, though there is news that masquerades as the good news. Paul is being facetious or, as Luther says, he's speaking ironically as if saying, now you Galatians have a different evangelist and a different gospel. You despise my gospel and it's lost your respect. Luther goes on to imagine what the false teachers were telling the Galatians, he says. To be sure, Paul made a good start, but a good start is not enough for there are more sublime things to follow than that. Those things are Jewish laws like circumcision, which he concludes are tantamount to saying that Christ is a good workman who has begun a building and has not completed it and that Moses must complete it. As Luther is writing about this in his own sermon on this passage, he's referring to schismatics of his own day who were accusing him of virtually the same thing, saying Luther's gospel is a good start with the return to Christ and faith and all that. But we need to have more than that. And ironically, the sectarians end up returning to the same kind of law keeping that Luther left behind in Rome. But they did so apparently with a much more hostile attitude, if that's possible, referring to the Lutherans as cowards who do not speak the truth frankly, as if you could ever read anything Martin Luther ever said and think he's not speaking frankly, right? Luther returns the favor, referring to them as perverse and satanic men, rightly bringing the supernatural back into the discussion, as I'm going to show you that Paul does here in just a moment. You can see from these kinds of exchanges that we've got some very serious things going on here. This is not a time to be cowardly, as he was being accused of, but stand up to the plate, figure out what you really think about the gospel. Before I get to those supernatural things, Paul goes on to say that there are some who trouble you who want to distort the gospel of Christ. And what he's doing here is he's switching from the Galatians themselves to the teachers that are tempting them. He calls them certain ones or some. He uses the indefinite pronoun, avoiding the use of names and thus giving them free publicity, as one person says. The apostolic father, Ignatius, gives a reason why he might not want to mention names, and perhaps he's speaking for Paul. He says, since they are unbelievers, I have decided not to write them down, but may I not even remember them until they repent about Christ's suffering, which is our resurrection. And so they're both kind of getting the point that these people are not even worth mentioning by name. Now, in one way, it would have been helpful for Paul to give them a label, to call them something so that we would know exactly what the situation was that got him so angry, but in another way, leaving them Anonymous kind of gives them a timeless quality, doesn't it? Meaning that you can represent any kind of they can represent any kind of teacher that perverts the gospel, turning it into works. Righteousness is an example. And that means it's not wrong to apply the letter to cults or false teachers and churches today that do similar things, even if the exact same issue like circumcision isn't what they're doing. You see, anyone who puts new laws before you to follow in order to gain God's forgiveness and receive justification is in the category of these false teachers doesn't tell you. It doesn't matter if they tell you to become a Jew or a Roman or a Mormon or a Muslim or reformed if they do it, if they pervert the free grace of God in Christ and tell you that your deeds make you righteous, they distort the gospel. It matters not if those works are circumcision or Sabbath laws, blue laws or fundamentalist laws. It doesn't matter if they are religious or secular, Arminian or Calvinist, Protestant or Roman Catholic, Christian or Buddhist. Anyone who proclaims the message of grace that is not grace, a gospel that is not good news is distorting the truth. And that includes the good news of a rapture, if that good news is allowed to eclipse Christ's teaching and his first coming. The rapture isn't necessarily this kind of a problem, but it can be when you have these kinds of predictions and the things that are accompanied with it, as we've seen this last week. Now, I want to say this, there are a lot of errors that people can have that do not strike a fatal blow at the gospel, a lot of them. There are weaker and stronger brother issues. There are questions of lawsuits or marriage or speaking on in tongues or suffering for Christ. There are doctrinal questions, ethical questions, questions about eschatology and soteriology. People can be seriously messed up in a lot of ways. Their thinking can be bizarre, illogical, contradictory, but none of these receive the apostolic rebuke the way changing the gospel does telling people that in order to be saved, they must do certain things. I want to give Rome the benefit of the doubt here because she's proven herself to be extremely confused on this point. She believes that the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine of faith alone is a faith that is alone. She states this in Trent. Along with many Protestant semi-Pelagians, she claims that we are antinomian, that we hate the law, that we want to disobey God in all things in order to magnify grace, as Paul says in Romans. They are completely mistaken when they think that. Like so many others in church history, they cannot believe that God could declare a person righteous on the basis of somebody else's merit, let alone give them a desire to obey God that is not out of merit. As Charles Finney said, that would be a legal fiction. They think that good works must ultimately earn justification, even if they put it in sacramental language and all of that kind of stuff. This is exactly why the good news is good news. Because you can't do that. Once justified, we believe the gospel creates a new heart that desires to obey God out of thankfulness rather than merit. But the gospel is that God justifies sinners, not righteous, his enemies, not his friends. It is not about me. It's about God, it's not about works, it's about grace. Don't let anyone take away the precious pearl of Christian comfort or you're going to end up with no end of psychological and emotional misery that accompanies those who believe they must finally gain the father's approval. I said a moment ago, Luther turned this into supernatural issue. Verses eight through nine do this very thing. Now, these two verses are parallel verses when you read them. Verse eight describes two very specific examples of potential false teachers. These are real possibilities. Though we are not told that either one of them actually occurred here. Verse nine is a restatement that moves from the specific to the general. And both verses are followed by that word I brought up earlier anathema. So let's look at this a little bit more closely. Verse eight gives the example of a false teacher from Earth and then it is an example of a false teacher from heaven. Neither one of these examples are dark evil figures. Did you notice that they are the least likely candidates to commit such a grave sin. In this way, Paul encompasses every possibility he can possibly say. Both examples seem at first to be highly improbable, but are they? Are they really? The first example is we, if we should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let us be anathema. The we here includes Paul himself and his entire entourage, which probably includes Mark and Luke and Barnabas and others. The people that he mentioned back in verse two. Now, we don't know if, in fact, one or more of these teachers who initially came to Galatia. With Paul left him. Stayed behind and started preaching something different, or if these false teachers rose up from their midst. The Galatians themselves, or if they were actually following Paul around from island and city to city, wherever he went so that they could redo what or undo what he had done in his missionary journeys. We just don't know. It is curious that Paul had one he had more than one of his companions turn on him and leave him. And we know this specifically. He tells us names. He says Hymenaeus, Philetus and Alexander had swerved from the truth and shipwrecked their faith. More curious still, at least two of these were teaching something very similar to Mr. Camping. They taught that the resurrection had already occurred. It was eschatological troubles. Well, camping has not done this. Colts like the Jehovah's Witnesses, which made identical date setting claims for the return of Christ 100 years ago, would not repent, but instead claim that Jesus did come back. Did you know that they believe that he came back spiritually? This kind of date setting begs for apostasy because it's so difficult to admit sin and deception. That's why I felt it was both timely and advisable to mention it in this sermon. What happened yesterday was not a joke, and it's a terrible thing that has scarred the Church of Christ once more. We ought to be praying for Mr. Camping. He's not dead yet and for his followers that they would come to repentance. They haven't done exactly what Paul is talking about, but it's such a close thing that it led three of Paul's own friends to abandon and shipwreck the faith. So this is quite serious and we ought to we ought to think about it and pray for these people and ask that the Lord would return them to the truth. As we continue on, Paul mentions that another man named Demas was actually in love with the present age and that he had deserted Paul. He uses a softer Greek word than the one used in Galatians 1.6 for deserting, for Demas, but the point seems to be similar. And so when you combine these examples with his own real life ministry, it seems that almost anything really is possible. Think about Paul's own declaration that I am the chief of sinners and therefore even he knows that he is capable, apart from the grace of God, of perverting the very gospel that he has been preaching to them. So when he says we if we were to preach, I think that he's saying this is really possible now. If the first example is a possibility, so is the second. And I think this is important to grasp, he says, if an angel should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach, let him be anathema. Now, the word angel means a messenger, just like the word apostle means a messenger that I mentioned last week. But since angels can be human messengers, Paul clarifies which one he has in mind by adding the phrase from heaven. Paul is considering the fact that real angels can come down and proclaim false teachings that lead people astray. Now, many Christians do not have the supernatural worldview that is capable of handling the truth of this teaching, and so they dismiss it as hyperbole. But you should not be so inclined as to think that Paul's example could never have occurred in this world. Consider the following verses. Now, the spirit expressly says that in latter days, some will depart the faith, devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the doctrine of demons. He talks about the Lord's Supper to the Corinthians and says, I don't want you to be participants with demons. He refers to a messenger of Satan sent to Buffett him to keep him from exalting himself. He uses Satan's temptation in the Garden of Eden. As an example of present trouble, I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from sincere and pure devotion to Christ. He compares false apostles, deceitful workmen who disguise themselves as apostles of Christ, and he adds, even as Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, there's comparison going on between the two. And even in Galatians, he refers to the law being put into effect by angels, he refers to the stoichia, the elementary principles, demonic entities and so on. The point is, with all these verses from Paul's other letters, not only can heavenly beings teach evil things, friends, they do. They do. Simply put, this was the worldview of the ancients, and even if it is in our worldview, we need to understand that this is what they thought. We have a wealth of material from antiquity that makes it virtually certain that Paul has actual cases of angelic revelation in mind. This gets weirder and weirder the more you look into it, but it's important to look into it if you really want to understand the anathema at the end of the verses and what Paul is going to say later in this letter. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to help you try and understand this text, but I'm going to use this as a building block for later on in the book of Galatians, because I think that I was telling Tim yesterday, I think that as Paul lays out the letter of Galatians, He's kind of following the pattern that he sets up in verse eight here, men and angels. So for the first couple of chapters, he talks about circumcision, false teachers and men. And then in the next couple of chapters, he starts talking about heavenly things, which is introduced with the word who has bewitched you. Interesting word, but we'll get to that as we go on later and later in Galatians 414. Paul says to them. Though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but receive me as an angel of God. That's one of the weirdest verses in the entire New Testament, I have to say, in my mind, as I was looking at this a couple of months ago, it almost certainly refers back to Acts 14 when he was in the Galatian city of Lystra. And they and we read this when the crowd saw that what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying the gods have come down to us in the likeness of men. Barnabas, they called Zeus and Paul, they called Hermes. Who is Hermes in pagan thought, as is similar in biblical thought, angels are messengers sent to men by the gods. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament says this, the earthly sacral angel is the prototype of the heavenly angel, the heavenly angel in the strict sense is Hermes. Socrates says this name Hermes seems to me to have to do with speech, he is an interpreter and a messenger, and Homer tells the story of Zeus adding when Zeus is addressing Hermes. And he says, for as much as even all else, thou art our herald. Hermes is an incredibly important figure, he's the god of speech and writing, as well as healing and magic. From him, we get the words hermeneutic. And the word hermit. A solitary desert desert dweller. As the God of writing, he has a parallel in Jewish literature. With a God, with an angel named Penu, who was one of the guys who descended upon Mount Hermon in the days of Jared. Whether they are remembering the same being or not, the point is in calling Paul Hermes, the Galatians are echoing their worldview that angels can and have descended from heaven to teach human beings. Paul does not say this is impossible. He actually implies that it is possible. And that's quite a frightening thought, if you really want to get down to it. With this in mind, we come to the climax of these two verses. And the text today, whether it is himself or his companions or an angel from heaven, he then says that if they or we preach another gospel, let him be anathema. Now. Some scholars believe this word signifies excommunication. One writes in this passage, this is the first instance of Christian excommunication. However, as Herman Ritterboss and others point out, this cannot be true in an ecclesiastical sense, because angels do not belong as members of churches. Now, that seems fairly reasonable to me. Some translations focus on the eternal rather than temporal curse, rendering it as something like eternally condemned, let him be eternally condemned. That's why the NIV says, in other words, this is an excommunication. All right. It's an excommunication to hell. Now, that actually fits with the idea of church discipline, binding and loosing and the keys of the kingdom. This is obviously a much more serious kind of thing than merely being kicked out of the church, which is the way so many people think of it today. Even though the two being kicked out of church and being kicked into hell have always been linked in Israel and church history until very recently and really in America, if somebody was out of the community in the Old Testament, they were condemned to damnation. Think about the Hebrew who was kicked out of the camp into the wilderness, into the desert. This signifies exclusion from participation with God and his people. The church represents and is in a very real sense, heaven on earth, but to find the real significance of the word, you have to go looking to the Old Testament. As Jerome long ago noticed, Jerome is the church father that translated the text, the Greek text into Latin. He says this word is properly a word of the Jews, and that's pretty interesting. The Septuagint translates the Hebrew word Kerem. Here's where things get really weird. You find the same root word in Mount Hermon. Karem Herman Herman, as I said earlier, is where Hermes, the son of Pan was worshiped. Of course, I just mentioned that these Galatians called Paul Hermes. Herman or Karem is translated in English as devoted to destruction. To put it another way, you'll read in some of the text this phrase called the ban. Have you ever heard of the ban? The ban was where they would go into the cities of Canaan and they would devote to destruction everything in those cities. Man, woman, animal belongings, possessions. The first persons ever put under the ban, according to the Jews, were the watchers who placed themselves under the ban in Enoch. There's a verse here that has a word play on Herman and the band, the curse says they were all 200 and they descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Herman and they called it Herman because they had sworn a bond with themselves and a curse upon it. They put a curse on themselves. So Herman and Kareem provide a nice wordplay in that text. The word Kareem can be used of anything devoted to God. But it's only used in a positive sense on a rare occasion, the vast majority of the time, this term refers to something delivered up and devoted to the judicial wrath of Yahweh. It's to be thought of as a sacrifice, an object for religious devotion, as in devote to destruction. When the Israelites went into the city of Jericho, for instance, everything in that city, except Rahab, was placed under the ban. But Akin took some of the spoil for himself and because of it brought the anathema of God upon the community, and Akin was eventually killed for his treason. Remember that story? Here's where it gets really crazy. Very specifically, the word is used almost exclusively in the Old Testament to refer to the people or spoils of the land of Canaan. That is, to the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, and other clans that were there. Jericho was one of those places. In fact, it was called by the by the old Arab people, the city of giants. I believe one of the specific examples of this ban is actually in the forefront of Paul's mind when he's writing this text, and we read it for the law today. Deuteronomy 13, verses 13 through 18. If you hear in one of your cities, which the Lord your God is giving you to live, anyone saying that some worthless man, that word is literally son of Belial. Belial is the name of Satan that Paul uses in Corinthians, that they have gone out from among you and seduced the inhabitants of their city, saying, let us go and serve other gods. You shall utterly destroy all the dwellers of that land with the edge of the sword and shall solemnly curse it. Anathema and all things in it and all its spoils. You shall gather into its public way and you shall burn the city with fire and all its spoils publicly before the Lord your God and it shall be uninhabited forever. In other words, a desert. It shall be not be built again, and there shall be nothing of the cursed anathema thing cleaved to your hand that the Lord may turn from his fierce anger and show mercy and pity to you. In that passage, you have quite literally children of the devil proclaiming a message to worship other gods. This is remarkable. Given the fact that Paul has just spoken of angels preaching another gospel and placing a ban upon one of them, if they should be so bold. Recall, finally, that these Galatians are the Celts, that they have referred to Paul as Hermes, as an angel from heaven. And you start to see these two verses in a whole different light. I believe what Paul is doing here is placing any teacher, be it human or angelic, of earthly origin or human origin in the same category as the notorious, nefarious Nephilim and their fathers in elder days. In fact, I think he's saying that such a teacher is actually following this ancient example, which has caused God to place them under curse in the first place. Their message is a resurrection of a Luciferian message that has been around since ancient times. It slaps Christ in the face while exalting evil beings who fell from heaven and propping up wicked men on the earth. Simply by looking at the anger that God had against these inhabitants of Canaan and the contempt the Israelites were to have against everything associated with them. Including utter and complete destruction of them, their animals, their possessions, you begin to get the seriousness of the anathema Paul is placing. I wonder, do you think of counterfeit gospels as a spiritual counterfeit? as a satanic deception, as a message from elder times, or you just tend to think that men innocently disagree with God and find their own new message to promote. Have you been deceived as to the seriousness of all this? It ought to cause you to consider the supernatural origin of Paul's message, as well as that of his opponents, and recognize that before you is a spiritual battle for the eternal souls of men and women, including yourself. The apostle is not messing around here. In fact, I know of no other place in the Bible where a curse is actually repeated immediately after it's just been spoken. Verse nine summarizes, says, as I've said before, so now I say again, most commentators think he's referring to verse eight, but he probably is referring back to when he was there, when he was reminding them and teaching them of this very thing when he was in their presence. In other words, he saw the seeds of this Way back when he visited them on his first journey. And so he says, if anyone is preaching you a gospel contrary to the one you receive, let him be anathema. Let the band be on him. Let him be devoted to destruction. May he and all his belongings perish with him. May he be cast into the very pit of hell with those satanic forerunners who taught similar lies and led men into the worship of angels and demons. rather than the true God who is forever praise. I began with examples of rapture, fever and Roman anathema against the Protestant gospel. The first virtually eclipses the gospel through a fanatic obsession with the second coming and perfect disregard for Jesus' own words on the matter. And the second example places the ban upon anyone who believes that we're justified by faith apart from works. It teaches that ours is a lie from hell itself. I'm actually thankful that both groups contradict themselves on these matters because it allows the followers the ability to not be finally taken over by the deception. Nevertheless, they both demonstrate that the gospel is under attack on many fronts and in many ways today. And through the mud and confusion, the lies and deception you have to listen to and believe only in God's grace that comes in Christ alone. You have to place your hope in his death, burial and resurrection. If you do, God will impute to you a perfect righteousness because he loves to show grace. Don't be led astray by false teachers that appeal to your carnal senses, that prey upon your fears. that tickle your ears that promise you the world or get you to focus on yourself. God will deal with them. But he will hold you accountable as well. The anathema remains upon anyone who preaches a false gospel, but the warning goes out to those who hear it and believe it. And so the call is to trust in Christ alone and be satisfied in him as you wait for God to take you home in his good time. Lord, would you please hear our prayer. Use your word this morning. Help us to understand the significance of the importance that is for us in these words, and I pray that your Holy Spirit would teach us in Jesus name.