No Other Gospel

My wife sent me to the grocery store the other day. She gave me a list of the ingredients she needed to bake a cake: milk, eggs, sugar, butter. But when I got there, I found some alternatives. Here’s what I came home with:

Instead of the milk, I found this neat substitute—a non-dairy coffee creamer called Cremora Lite. It contains nice wholesome ingredients like partially hydrogenated sunflower oil, dipotassium phosphate, sodium silico aluminate, and diacetyl tartaric acid ester of mono- and diglycerides. Sounds a lot more potent than milk!

Instead of the eggs, I got this product called Table Ready. It’s an egg product that has a few things added to it, such as alpha tocopherol acetate, calcium pantothenate, and pyridoxine hydrochloride. Anything with hydrochloride in it has gotta be better than eggs!

Instead of the sugar, I came home with a package of Sweet ‘n Low. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the little warning sign on the package from the surgeon general. “This product has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”

And instead of the butter, I bought this product called Promise. It has a lot of interesting stuff in it, but it promises to taste just like real butter.

What do you suppose a cake would taste like that was made up of all those substitute ingredients? Well, it might be edible, but I don’t think it would win any Pillsbury National Bake-Offs.

We have become used to accepting substitutes for many things in our lives, but there is one area where we had better not accept any substitutes. That is in the area of spiritual truth—specifically, on what basis we are seeking to have a relationship with God.

We come today to the book of Galatians—a book which is one of the most important books in all of the Bible. The book of Galatians has had a tremendous impact on history. It has been called the “hammer of the Protestant Reformation”. Martin Luther was so enamored of it that he called it “my Catherine von Bora”—referring to his wife.

It was written by the Apostle Paul, around the year 50 AD, to a group of Christians who lived in what is now the land of Turkey, but at that time was the Roman province of Galatia.

These people had become Christians through the ministry of Paul on his earliest missionary journey. Most of them were Gentiles. They were new Christians, young Christians, but they had a problem. They were struggling in their understanding of spiritual things. They were a people in confusion because they had begun to accept a substitute for the original message of good news that Paul had preached to them.

How had this happened? Let me explain.

You probably know that the early church began in Jerusalem. As such, it was made up mainly of Jews. In fact, it was not until the missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul that the gospel of Jesus Christ began to make any significant inroads into the Gentile world.

Paul traveled into Asia Minor and Greece—areas where the population was overwhelmingly non-Jewish—preaching the good news about Jesus Christ. He made many converts. He planted many churches. But that created certain tensions within the Jewish Christian community back in Jerusalem.

You see, the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem continued to observe many of the practices of Judaism. This was especially true of those Jews who had come to Christ out of the most orthodox forms of Judaism. They still went up to the Temple to pray. They still circumcised their male children. They still observed the special feast days and the kosher dietary laws of Judaism. For them, it was simply a matter of doing what they had always done.

But when these Gentiles began to become Christians, the whole issue of their relationship to the Jewish Law was raised. Some of the Jews began to demand that these Gentile converts—who had never observed any of these traditions—now must adopt them. They even insisted that if a Gentile did not begin to observe the Jewish Law, he could not really be a Christian.

This issue became so controversial that ultimately, the apostles, who were the leaders of the church, called a special conference in Jerusalem to decide the matter. You can read about this conference in Acts 15.

But in the meantime, the orthodox Jewish believers continued to insist that the Gentiles had to adopt the Jewish Law. They even went as far as to send out emissaries to the new Gentile churches that Paul was planting in Asia Minor to make sure that they got their point across. This group of itinerant teachers became known as the Judaizers because they were teaching the Gentiles that you had to adopt Judaism in order to be truly saved.

And evidently, they visited Galatia. And they had almost convinced the Galatian Christians that the Gospel that they had heard from Paul was an incomplete gospel. He hadn’t given them the whole story. They were missing something. They were missing the Law.

This is the situation that caused Paul to write this letter to the Galatians. Listen to how he expresses his anguish for them. He says in verse 6…

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel”

He says “I am amazed! I marvel! It blows my mind that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you. The word “deserting” means to put yourself in a different place. The verb is in the Middle Voice, indicating that they were doing it themselves—it was a choice they were making. They couldn’t blame it on any outside influence. And the verb is in the present tense, indicating that they were continuing to do it.

They were continuing to put themselves in a different place with regard to the one who called them by turning to a different Gospel. The word “different” there is heteros. It means something entirely different in kind—qualitatively different. In fact, Paul goes on in verse 7 to say:

“It is really not just a different Gospel; it is no Gospel at all.” It is not good news that you have begun to believe—it is bad news.

You have swallowed the line of these Judaizers. They have thrown you into confusion—they have troubled you, agitated you, stirred you up, robbed you of your peace of mind—because they are trying to pervert—the word means to twist into a different shape—the gospel of Christ.

Have you noticed how many “gospels” there are out there in our world? How many ideas, or philosophies, or lifestyles which promise to bring happiness, and meaning, and a secure destiny?

There are all kinds of so-called gospels which leave Jesus Christ right out of the picture. I would call these contrary gospels. Most of the great world religions leave Jesus Christ right out of the picture.

The religion of secular humanism is a contrary gospel. It claims that by education, information, legislation, and perspiration, we’re going to better the lot of mankind until one day there will be peace on earth and people will live in harmony. That’s a contrary gospel. It’s contrary to the Word of God.

But that’s not the kind of gospel that Paul is warning us to look out for. Contrary gospels are pretty easy to identify. But Paul says “it is the counterfeit gospel that is the bigger danger for a Christian.” So Watch out for counterfeit gospels.

What do you know about a counterfeits? Well, a counterfeit “works” because it looks a lot like the real thing.

Have you ever seen a counterfeit bill? I have. Years ago, a police officer handed me a counterfeit $20 bill. He told me that it was counterfeit and he asked me to see if I could discover why. And I couldn’t, because it looked for all the world like the genuine article. But then he showed me that one of the tiny lines of engraving around the number 20 wasn’t quite right. And that’s how they knew that it was counterfeit.

Now you might think that a counterfeit can be relatively harmless. You or I might even have had a counterfeit bill pass through our hands and not even have been aware of it. We may have bought groceries with it, or gasoline, and have been none the wiser. But counterfeits are not always so benign.

Years ago, in a hospital in Binghamton, NY, a pediatric nurse mistakenly substituted salt in the newborn babies’ formula instead of sugar. The formula looked the same, but several babies died.

And a counterfeit gospel can be just as deadly because it takes you away from Jesus Christ. It devalues who He is and what He did on the Cross and puts a worthless substitute in his place.

This is what was happening to the Galatians. They had originally heard from Paul the gospel of Jesus Christ—how God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, had come to earth to die for our sins. And how by simply believing in Him, we could have eternal life.

That Gospel is a gospel of grace—God’s grace to sinners. There’s no place in it for our merit—we didn’t deserve what Jesus did for us. There’s no place in it for our performance—Jesus did it all for us. He did what was necessary to bring us to God. And there’s no place in that gospel of grace for anything further needing to be done to make us acceptable to God. It’s a work of God’s grace from beginning to end.

If you want to put it in terms of a scientific equation, it would look something like this:

God’s grace + Christ’s work = my salvation

But the problem with the Galatians was that they were now beginning to believe that the equation looked more like this:

God’s grace + Christ’s work + my work in keeping the Law = my salvation

You see the difference? It isn’t a contrary gospel. There’s still room for Jesus there. But it’s a counterfeit gospel. It looks a lot like the real thing, but it isn’t. It’s a substitute.

Now you might say, “Well why all the fuss and bother about this? I mean, it’s not as though we’re in danger of suddenly adopting the Jewish Law, is it? I haven’t seen anybody coming to church in a yarmulke, lately, or refusing to eat pork barbecue at the Sunday School picnic. So what’s the big deal?”

Well the deal is this. We Bible-believing, evangelical, Conservative Baptist Christians often insert our own “Law” into the gospel of grace. We would never say it overtly, but we sometimes imply that unless you talk the way we do, or worship the way we do, or believe as we do, or dress the way we do, or observe the customs that we do—then your Christianity may be suspect. You’re inferior. You may not be quite as “in” with God as we are.

So we set up these little “tests of faith”. Do you dance? Do you raise your hands when you worship? Do you wear a shirt and tie to church? Do you sing the old hymns of the faith?

Now I’m not trying to be critical here, but we all happen to have this little thing called Pride that we struggle with. It is something that causes us to delight in what we do and look down our noses at what others do, or don’t do.

I’ll give you an example. Sometimes I drive through downtown Allentown and see people sitting on their front porch in the middle of the day with seemingly nothing to do. I find myself thinking “I wonder why these people aren’t at work? I wonder how many of these people are on welfare? Why don’t they go out and get a job?” And I find it especially easy to think those thoughts when the people I am looking at are of another ethnic group than my own.

You know what makes us think that way? Pride. Pride in my own accomplishments. Pride in my own station in life. Pride in the fact that I’ve gotten to where I am now by my own hard work. Pride in my group, my values, my identity.

Now when I come to the gospel of grace, do you think I all of a sudden lose my pride? No, I certainly don’t! I find that my pride rebels against that gospel which says that I am nothing and Christ is everything. It goes completely against the grain of my pride to admit that, as far as God is concerned, I am a candidate for welfare. I have nothing and I can’t work.

And I find that my pride tries every way possible to weasel a way into that gospel of grace and find a place for my accomplishment, my performance, my good deeds.

And God says “No. Any such gospel isn’t the authentic gospel. It’s a counterfeit. It’s a substitute for my gospel of grace.” If you try to equate the Christian life with living up to a certain set of standards, you’re in danger of abandoning the gospel of grace. And if you abandon the gospel of grace, you quickly lose sight of God’s face. Because grace is what God is all about.

What’s at stake in this issue? Everything is at stake. The gospel of grace is crucial. Look at verses 8–9…

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

Paul uses a powerful word there—it’s the word “anathema”. It means “let him be accursed.” In other words “Let him go to hell.” The gospel of grace is so crucial that even if an angel from heaven came and preached to you a different gospel—even if a smooth, persuasive TV preacher, or evangelist, or Bible scholar, or famous Christian author preached to you a different gospel—you’d better not believe it, because it wouldn’t be the gospel of grace.

And the gospel of grace—the gospel that says “Jesus paid it all; all to Him I owe”—is the only gospel by which you can be saved. There is no other gospel. What is at stake here is the souls of men and women who will go to hell and spend eternity separated from God if they believe any other gospel.

And finally, this gospel of grace will be controversial. Look at verse 10. Paul says…

Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men?

When I tell you these things, Galatians, do you think I’m trying to win a popularity contest?

If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.

The gospel of God’s grace is controversial. It was in Paul’s day, and it certainly is in our day as well, because it goes against the prevailing views and values of our culture.

We live in an age of tolerance for many different viewpoints. Imagine the nerve of God, then, for suggesting something as intolerant as the fact that there’s only one point of view that matters—His. And if you don’t see things His way, you’re doomed.

The gospel of God’s grace is dogmatic in an age of diversity. It is exclusive in an age of inclusivity. It is absolute in an age of relativity. It proclaims itself to be the One Way in a world that claims that there are many ways.

And if you and I are going to stand for the gospel of God’s grace in this world in which we live, we’re going to have to be prepared to be vilified and rejected by our culture. The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to those who think that they can work their way to heaven. Paul talks in Gal. 5:11 of the offense of the cross.

In the nostrils of spiritually arrogant, prideful people we will be the aroma of death, because the gospel of grace demands the death of pride. Jesus said “It’s only when you lose your life for my sake that you find it.” He said “If any man would come after me me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”

The gospel of grace is hard for us to swallow. It’s hard for us to realize that there is nothing for us to do to make ourselves presentable in God’s sight. Nothing to pay for, nothing to make up, nothing to deserve.

You’ve probably heard that old expression “TANSTAAFL” - there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Well I’m here to tell you that there is a free lunch. It’s called the Gospel. God has called us to come and eat at his table. And he’s done that because he is a God of grace.

The book of Galatians is about that grace. I hope you’ll join me in the coming weeks as we study it together.