(Transcript of the video above, edited for readability)
Yeah, Galatians is a great letter. It's about the gospel: Paul's defending the gospel to the churches of Galatia because it's come under attack. And in that letter he explains that salvation is by God's grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone plus nothing. What had happened in the churches of Galatia that Paul himself had planted was there were people who came in and they began to add to it. They didn't say, you don't need Jesus or You don't need faith. But they said, yeah, you need Jesus. You need to trust in Jesus, but you got to have this too. And they were reverting back to Old Testament rituals, particularly circumcision, saying that if you're going to be a real Christian, then you have to be a Jew. You have to keep the Jewish customs, the Jewish laws that were ceremonial. When Paul hears about this, he gets highly exercised.
And so in his letter, he doesn't even commend them at the beginning like he does and all the other letters that he writes to different churches. He gets straight to the point and he says, I can't believe you're doing this. I can't believe you're so quickly turning away from the grace of God in the gospel. So what we have in the Book of Galatians is Paul's explanation of and defense of what it means to have God come to us in the person of his son and rescue us by his grace, and to receive that through faith plus nothing. So the Book of Galatians has been called The Manifesto of Christian Freedom. In that sense, it's Christ and Christ alone. So it's a great book to study if you want to get your mind around what the true gospel is and to see how that is distinguished from things that are almost the gospel, but not quite.
(Published on Christianity.com on November 7, 2012)
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