Posts from January 2022

When Paul writes about “liberty” in Galatians 5:1, this word refers to freedom from the guilt and condemnation of sin – NOT “freedom” to do as we please without consequences. Paul is pointing Christians to the fact that being forgiven of our past sins does not give us a “license” to engage in new sins! Peter had described the Law of Moses as a “yoke of bondage” that should not be imposed on Gentile Christians (Acts 15:10), and as Paul…

In Galatians 3:1, Paul asks a question designed to challenge the Galatian Christians’ thinking about their own salvation. It appears that someone had been trying to persuade these (mostly) Gentile Christians that they first had to become proselyte Jews, before they could actually be saved through Jesus. Paul confronts this doctrine in verse two by asking how these believers had become Christians in the first place. By emphasizing that the keeping of Moses’ law had played NO part in their…

The second chapter of Galatians introduces Paul’s experience in Jerusalem after his conversion to Christ (about seventeen years earlier, cf. Galatians 1:18 and 2:1). He went there to confer with the other apostles, as a way of confirming that the message he was preaching – among the Gentiles – was the same as they had presented to the Jews (and it was, 2:9-10). While he was in Jerusalem, however, some “false brethren” attempted to impose additional requirements on what Paul…