Galatians Paraphrased for the 21st Century Reader

This post is Part 1 of a book titled Dead but Living, written by Ray Sammons. The entire book, including 29 colored pictures of the places Paul may have seen, is available in print and ebook here.

The Forward and Introduction explain the book and its purpose.

Forward

Every once in a while, a new type of book comes along that helps us understand and apply God’s Word. This is such a book.

Many people have translated the Bible, written paraphrases to help you understand its meaning, and compiled reference books to supply background and commentary.  In as much as I am involved in all three endeavors, I would certainly affirm the importance of each. However, Dead But Living is in a different category, combining elements of all three.

While it is not a Bible, it is based on the Bible and conveys the author’s understanding of God’s Word.

It is somewhat like a paraphrase, but it goes beyond even what most paraphrases do. Sentences are rearranged. Explanations added. Insights included.

While it is not a reference book, it does include many interesting background facts and pictures that will help the message come alive in ways that perhaps you have not experienced.

The end goal of Dead But Living is to help us all understand and rejoice in the fact that, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the gospel bids us come and die; and yet it is only those who die in Christ who truly live. We live with Christ, and in community with one another.

May this book truly help you see this.

Dr. Bill Mounce

President

BiblicalTraining.org

Introduction

Dead But Living is a book about the most important issue of life: how to be accepted by and at peace with God. To explain how this is possible, two books of the Bible, Galatians and James, have been re-phrased for the twenty-first-century reader.

Part 1 of the book is Galatians re-phrased. This letter details how to be spiritually dead yet still be alive from God’s perspective. The first rule God gave Adam and Eve was to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and punishment for violating that rule carried the death sentence.

Part 2 is the letter from James to the Jews around the world, re-phrased for Gentile readers. This letter gives some instructions about how to live our lives once we are dead but living.

You will find this book mentally stimulating at the very least and life-changing at best.

Part 1

Galatians Rephrased

DATE: AD 57

FROM: Paul of Tarsus, Corinth, Greece

TO: Christians in Galatia

RE: The false teachers in Galatia

Please share this letter with each of the churches in Galatia.

I am surprised to hear you have allowed some Jewish teachers from Jerusalem to come to Galatia and teach that all believers in Jesus must be circumcised. I am even more surprised that some of you are transferring your allegiance to this perversion of the gospel. Therefore, I am writing this letter to again share with you the good news about Jesus.

I understand those false teachers are saying my teaching is wrong because I have never had any instruction about the gospel. So I’ll begin by reviewing the source of my knowledge.

Paul’s Education

I did not get the gospel I preach from the leaders of the Jerusalem church. The gospel I preach came directly from Jesus. Let me explain.

You know the kind of person I was fifteen to twenty years ago. I hated the people who were perverting the laws and traditions of our fathers by following Jesus. When Jesus was traveling around preaching, I was in Jerusalem studying to become a Pharisee under the great teacher of the Law, Gamaliel. After Jesus was crucified I tried to destroy his followers and his teaching. I was more zealous than anyone my age and I directed the Sanhedrin-Guard to drag men, women, and whole families to Jerusalem before the Sanhedrin for punishment.

Paul’s Conversion

I was on my way to Damascus, accompanied by some of the Sanhedrin-Guard, with orders from the Chief Priest to find the followers of “the way,” bind them with chains, and take them back to Jerusalem for punishment. As we approached Damascus, Jesus himself appeared to me and said he had chosen me to proclaim his gospel to the Gentiles. That was the hardest moment of my entire life: I discovered first that Jesus was alive, and second that he wanted me to go tell Gentile sinners they could be his followers.

I was so shocked that I did not return home. Instead I went into the Arabian Desert and stayed there for three years. It was there that Jesus revealed himself to me little by little. He revealed the gospel to me and I learned about his plan to forgive both Jews and Gentiles equally. I also learned he had revealed his plan long ago in the Scriptures and I had missed it.

When my training was finished, I went back to Damascus and started teaching what I had learned. The Jews there would not accept me or my teaching. It got so bad that they were waiting at the city gates to kill me, so some of Jesus’ followers lowered me down a back wall of the city in a basket and I escaped.

Then I went to Jerusalem to see Peter; I stayed with him for fifteen days, and I met James also. The Jews learned I was in Jerusalem and they started trouble, so I left and began preaching the gospel in Syria and Cilicia.

The Jerusalem Council

About fourteen years later, after Barnabas and I had finished our first missionary trip, the trip where we met you, God revealed to me that I should go to Jerusalem and share with the church there the gospel I was preaching. Barnabas and Titus went along on that trip.

At first, we met with the church leaders in small groups, explaining to them our gospel and what God was doing for the people we were teaching. Peter, James, and John, the pillars of the church, did not add anything to my gospel. They understood what God was doing through us and they did not require our friend Titus, a Gentile, to be circumcised. I should add, however, that some spies from the Sanhedrin infiltrated our meetings and tried to get us involved with circumcision. We did not listen to them even for a moment.

When we left, Peter, James, and John shook hands with me and Barnabas, telling us to continue preaching to the Gentiles and that they would continue preaching to the Jews. The only thing they asked was for us to help the poor, especially the poor in Jerusalem, and we were already eagerly doing that.

Paul Corrects Peter

Instead of being taught by the leaders of the church, I had to correct them. When Peter came to visit us in Antioch, he ate his meals with the Gentile Christians just like we did. But as soon as some followers of James came from Jerusalem, Peter went back to the Jewish tradition of refusing to eat with Gentiles, even the Christian Gentiles. Barnabas also started following their example. When I found out about this, I stood up in the next public meeting and corrected Peter, saying,

“Peter, you were born a Jew, but you have been living like a Gentile. Why do you now urge and practically force these Gentiles to live like Jews? You and I are both born Jews, and not mere Gentile sinners, and we ourselves have learned that we can’t have a right standing before God by keeping our own Jewish laws.

“Both you and I have been teaching that observance of the Law is not essential to being right with God. Now if we, by word or practice, suggest that keeping the Law is essential, we nullify the gospel.”

The Gospel

“As we both know, nobody can keep the whole Law, therefore the Law condemns us to death; it demands that we die to pay for the laws we have broken. The good news is that Christ obediently died in our place, and therefore, through our reliance on him, we died to the Law. Since we are dead before the Law the Law has no control over us, the Law is useless to us. We are now free from the Law to live for God.”

Let me make a personal example. When Christ was crucified, I (and every believer) was crucified through him before the Law. So now as I live, the Law sees me dead with Christ; now I live in complete trust in and reliance on the Son of God, who loved me so much that he died in my place.

Therefore, we must not treat God’s gift as something of minor importance. We should do absolutely nothing that would set aside, invalidate, or frustrate our gift from God.

I am very concerned about you folks in Galatia; I’m concerned about your lack of good judgment. When I was there you understood the meaning of Jesus’ death as plain as if I had waved a placard in front of your eyes. You not only understood it but you relied upon it and were filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit

Now let me ask you a question about those days:

 Did God give you the Holy Spirit because you were keeping the Jewish Law?

Of course not!

You received the Holy Spirit after you understood Jesus’ death and you trusted him to save you from the penalties of the Law.

Let me ask another question: If trying to obey the Jewish laws could not give you eternal life in the first place, why do you think trying to keep them now will make you stronger Christians?

Consider Abraham

Consider the experience of our father Abraham, the first Jew. He lived before the Law was given. He had the same experience we have had. God made him fit for heaven because he believed what God told him.

God gave Abraham a promise and he wrote it down. Part of his promise looked forward to the time he would save the Gentiles by their faith when it said, “I will bless those in every nation who believe me as you do.”

Therefore, in God’s eyes, all of us who rely on Christ are partners in fellowship with Abraham.

Consider the Law

Please take a close look at what the Law says. When God gave the Law, 430 years after his promise to Abraham, it came with a curse on those who rely on keeping the Law to gain a right standing before God. It says, “Cursed is everyone who at any time breaks just one of the laws written in the book of the Law!”

Cursed means they are devoted to destruction and doomed to eternal punishment.

The Good News

The good news is that Christ has bought us out from under that impossible Law by becoming a curse in our place. The Scripture says anyone who hangs on a tree (is crucified) is cursed.

Answer me this: Why would anyone in their right mind and with good judgment try to gain a right standing before God by keeping the Law when they know the only way to have a right standing before God is by believing him?

The prophet Habakkuk, who lived 1,400 years after Abraham understood this, said, “The man who is declared right before God because of his faith in God’s promise shall live.”

God gives men a right standing before him when they rely on Christ, therefore he can give this right standing to Gentiles as well as to Jews. Now all of us, both Jews and Gentiles, can have the Holy Spirit through our reliance on Christ.

God’s Contract

I know some of you are having a problem with this because the same God who made the promise to Abraham also gave the Law to Moses. Let me illustrate the connection with an example. When a man signs a written contract, he cannot later change his mind, break the contract, and decide to do something different. God operates the same way.

God made a contract with Abraham and his child. Note the contract was not with his children, meaning all Jews, but with his child. He made the contract with Abraham and Christ. This means that the Law, which came 430 years later, cannot void the contract and make a new and different way to have a right standing before God.

Why the Law Was Given

The logical question then is this: If God’s contract with Abraham is still good, why did he give the Law to Moses? The answer is simple. He gave the Law to show us Jews just how guilty we are before him. It was our teacher and our guardian, until Christ came.

Now that Christ has come, we don’t need those laws to guide us to him.

Now in Christ Jesus, we are all (both Jew and Gentile) sons of God because of our faith in Jesus. In Christ there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, slave or free, male or female; we are all Christians, and we are all one in Christ.

Now that we belong to Christ, we are his children. Since we are Christ’s children, we are descendants of Abraham, and all God’s promises to Abraham apply to us.

A Will

Here is another way to look at our Jewish relationship with the Law. In normal life, when a father dies and leaves a large, valuable estate to his underage son, the son is not much better off than a slave. He is under the protection of guardians and must do what they say until he grows up. That is the way it was with us. Before Christ came we were like slaves, following the guidance of the Law.

The Gospel

At exactly the right time, God sent his Son, born to a human mother, under the Law, so that he could buy our freedom from the Law and adopt us as full-grown adult sons. Consider what this means.

We are not slaves to the Law any longer; now we are God’s own adult sons! And since we are his sons, everything he has belongs to us. All of us are heirs of God because that is the way he decided it should be.

You Gentiles have the same kind of history; before you knew God, you were slaves to so-called gods. You followed special rules and observed certain days, months, and seasons according to the traditions of gods that really did not exist. Now that you have found God, or I should say now that God has found you, you are free from these gods. You, too, are sons of the true living God. You, too, are heirs of God.

Don’t Change the Gospel

I am staggered by the thought that you want to add to Christ’s death by being circumcised and that you Gentiles want to revert back to pagan practices. When I hear these things about you, I wonder if the time I spent with you was wasted.

I’m sure you remember that I was sick when I first preached the gospel to you. In fact, that was the reason we stayed so long in Galatia. I vividly recall that you did not reject me then, even when I was sick. You accepted me as an angel from heaven, or Jesus Christ himself! You would even have plucked out one of your eyes and given it to me, if it would have helped. What has happened to that good relationship we had then? Have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?

Ishmael and Isaac

Those of you who want to be under the Law, do you really know what the Scripture says? Consider this illustration:  Abraham, our spiritual father, had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. There was nothing unusual about Ishmael’s birth. His mother was Hagar, a slave, and he was born in the ordinary course of nature.

Isaac’s birth is another story. His mother was a free woman, Abraham’s wife. At just the right time, when she was ninety years old, God gave Sarah the son he had promised her twenty-four years before.

In this illustration Ishmael’s mother, the slave, is like present-day Jerusalem, the mother city of the Jews. She represents all the people who are trying to please God by keeping the commandments. All those people are in bondage; they are slaves to a system of rituals.

Isaac was born to Sarah, the free woman, and she represents the heavenly Jerusalem, the mother city of those who come to God by faith. You and I are like Isaac; we are born into God’s family because of the promise God made to Abraham.

Ishmael was fourteen years older than Isaac, and he despised and persecuted his little brother. It is the same today. Those of us who are born of the Holy Spirit are persecuted by those who want us to keep the Jewish laws. But remember what the Scripture says happened to Hagar and Ishmael. Sarah said, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac” (Gen. 21:10 NIV).

The point of this illustration is this: We who come to God because of our faith are not cast out like Ishmael. No, we are like Isaac, free from the Law and acceptable to God because of our trust in and reliance on his promise.

Not under Law

We Jews are free from the Law and you Gentiles are free from the bondage of imitation gods because Christ has paid our debt and set us free. If you allow yourselves to be circumcised or if you try to earn God’s favor by ceremonies, you offend Christ.

In fact, if you start relying on circumcision to earn your position before God, you must keep every other part of the Law without one tiny slip. You can’t earn God’s favor by having some faith and keeping some of the Law (the part you select). With God it is all one way or the other. You must keep all of the Law without one slip, or you must rely completely on God’s promise through faith without any effort to keep any part of the Law.

Let me say that plainly: If you rely on circumcision or any other ceremony to make you right before God, then Christ’s death cannot save you from God’s eternal punishment!

Because this is so serious, I beg you to not listen to those false teachers who have come to you. They have not come with God’s message.

Apply the Gospel

Now some conclusions:

• Christ set us free, and this gift of freedom brings a new set of responsibilities.
• Since we are trusting God to save us (both in this world and in the next), we have the responsibility to be responsive to and controlled by the Holy Spirit so we can experience all the good things God has planned for us.
• To help us, the Holy Spirit implants in each of us a set of new character traits:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

•  As we let the Holy Spirit guide us, we will experience the satisfaction of these traits in our lives every day.
• The Holy Spirit will guide us to help each other and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.
• If by chance a Christian among you gets entangled in some misconduct or sin, a group of you who are responsive to and controlled by the Holy Spirit should gently and humbly restore and reinstate him. Do this without any show of superiority, and be on guard so that one of you does not fall into the same temptation.
• If anyone thinks he is too busy or too important to shoulder somebody’s load, that person is important only in his own eyes. He is deceived and cheats himself.
• Each of us has his own load of little oppressive faults. Therefore we must do our very best, and when we have done the best we can, we will have the personal satisfaction of a work well done. We will have done the things that are worth doing and we won’t need to compare our work with anyone else’s work.
• When someone teaches you the Word of God, you should help him by paying him for his time.
• The man who tries to deceive God only deceives himself. God will give each person a harvest of exactly what he sows. If he sows to satisfy his own personal desires, apart from God, then he will reap decay and ultimate destruction.
• If a man is relying on Christ, he will sow to satisfy the Holy Spirit and he will reap all the benefits of everlasting life. Therefore, whenever the opportunity presents itself, do good things for anyone (something profitable, something that is for their spiritual advantage), and especially for our Christian brothers.

Salutation

I’ve taken the pen from the scribe and I’ll finish this letter in my own handwriting.

Notice how large I have to make the letters.

Those teachers who want you to be circumcised do it to avoid the persecution that comes from relying on Christ. They want to boast about your submission to them.

God forbid that I should boast about anything or anyone except the Lord Jesus Christ. Since I was crucified with him, my interest in the attractive things of this world was killed long ago, and the world’s interest in me is also long dead. Because of his cross it does not matter if we are circumcised or uncircumcised. What matters is that inside is a new and different person.

Slave Scars

I want God’s mercy and peace to be your everyday experience. From now on please follow my instructions about these matters. Remember that I carry the scars of the whippings from Jesus’ enemies that mark me as his slave.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Sincerely,

Paul