Gospel Commitments | Galatians 2:1-14
Brian Hedges | September 10, 2017
Thank you, Stephani. What a wonderful reminder of that great hymn, “The Love of God.” Remember the hymnwriter said,
“Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Tho’ stretched from sky to sky.”
We’re grateful for the love of God.
Turn with me in God’s word to Galatians chapter 2. Galatians chapter 2; we’re going to be reading verses 1 through 14.
The history of the Christian church is both a history of mission and a history of doctrine. In my library I have both kinds of books on my shelves; I have histories of Christian mission, I have histories of Christian doctrine and theology that trace the doctrinal, theological development of the church over the ages. I think a lot of us naturally would probably gravitate towards one or the other. You might gravitate towards the missionary biographies or the stories of Christian mission and kind of feel like, “The doctrine is okay for those who are interested, but that’s a little bit dry, a little boring, not quite as interesting as reading about the formulation of councils and creeds and confessions of faith and so on.”
But what we have discovered in Christian history is that great periods of mission expansion, evangelistic zeal, and church planting have always been fueled by a fresh recovery of the purity of the gospel. So oftentimes it’s in the very context of recovering Christian doctrine that Christian mission flourishes.
So we really can’t divorce those two things. We have to have both Christian doctrine and theology if we’re going to have Christian mission. Some of the best and greatest theological work done for the church has been motivated by the desire to express and guard and protect the message that was having such an impact in the world.
A great example of that would be John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. In the preface to that book, or I believe it was the letter he wrote to Francis I, he actually says that the reason why he wrote the Institutes was to give expression to the faith for which these French evangelists were dying. They were being martyred, they were dying, and he wanted to give a clear articulation of exactly what it was that they believed.
Well, theology and mission go hand-in-hand. You can’t really lose one without also losing the other, and this is really important for our understanding of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Now, I haven’t said a lot about the structure of this book. These are sermons, they’re not lectures, so I’ve tried to lean more towards a sermonic approach, but it is helpful, I think, to just pull back for a minute and try to understand how this book fits together. So let me explain this as we walk into this text this morning.
Galatians really is divided into three basic parts. Now, there’s some overlap here, but basically three divisions. Six chapters long, and in chapters 1 and 2 you have history, and that’s really what we’ve been looking at the last several weeks; it’s history. Paul is giving us history, and especially his own history. You get some of Paul’s autobiography at the end of chapter 1, as we saw last week, and then he begins to recount the history of his relationship with the Jerusalem apostles, and he continues doing that, as we’re going to see this morning.
Chapters 3 and 4 really deal with theology. It’s in those two chapters that you get the heart of this epistle as Paul gives his argument and actually uses the Old Testament Scriptures to argue for the gospel that he wants to defend. And then in chapters 5 and 6 he moves into ethics.
So we could say that in chapters 1 and 2 he’s dealing with the truth of the Gospel and his apostleship, if we could just kind of put a statement over those two chapters it would be, “There is no other gospel.” He’s giving us the history of this gospel, the gospel that he received.
Then in chapters 3 and 4 he’s giving us his defense of the gospel, and then in chapters 5 and 6 he’s talking about the life of the gospel. So, Paul’s apostleship, Paul’s gospel, and then Paul’s commands. If you could put a statement over chapters 4 and 4 it would be, “We are justified by faith in Christ, not by works of the law.” (He actually says that at the end of chapter 2 in something of a transition statement, and then expounds that in chapters 3 and 4.) And then, when he gets into ethics in chapters 5 and 6 we could say that the essence of that is, “Walk in the Spirit.”
So you can see that these things flow into one another; the history really flows into the theology, which then flows into life. So, if you’re sitting through this series feeling like, “Wow, there’s a lot of history coming through these sermons and a lot of theology coming through these sermons; sometimes I wish Brian would be a little bit more practical" —— it’s coming! Alright? We’re going to get to chapters 5 and 6. But this history and this theology informs all the practical things that Paul has to say in chapters 5 and 6, and of course, we’ll try to be practical all along the way, even as we make this journey.
So this morning we’re looking again at the historical background in chapter 2, and we begin to start getting into the theological, but especially we’ll see that next week. So here’s what I want to do. I want to begin by reading all of chapter 2; it’s a fairly short chapter, 21 verses, and then we’re going to focus on verses 1 through 14, but I want to go ahead and read verses 15 through 21, because that’s Paul’s response to Peter, whom he confronts in verses 11 through 14. So just to get Paul’s response in the full context, I’m going to read this whole chapter. So it’s projected on the screen, or you can read along in your own copy of God’s word. Here it is, God’s word, Galatians chapter 2.
“Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up because of a revelation and set before them (though privately before those who seemed influential) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain. But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery—to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter for his apostolic ministry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine to the Gentiles), and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?’ We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”
This is God’s word.
So, we’re going to study and focus on verses 1 through 14, and what we see in this description or this recounting by Paul of two meetings, two events, one in Jerusalem, one in Antioch, what we see are three gospel commitments. Three gospel commitments. I think this is really important. This is where you see the intersection of mission and doctrine with the church, three gospel commitments that we all need to have, we all need to make. Those commitments are to:
I. Unite in Gospel Fellowship
II. Fight for Gospel Freedom
III. Walk in Gospel Truth
Let’s look at each one of those.
I. Unite in Gospel Fellowship
First of all, we need to unite in gospel fellowship. Now you see this in verses 1 through 10 in Paul’s recounting of what happened in Jerusalem. He introduces this in verses 1 and 2, and then he kind of gives us the consequence, or the fruit of what happened, in verses 6 through 10. I’m going to skip verses 3 through 5 for the moment and come back to that in the second point.
So I’m just going to help us unpack this by asking a few questions, okay? So we’re dealing with history here. We need to ask, “When did this happen and what happened and why was Paul doing what he was doing and what was the result?”
So when did this take place? Look at verse 1: Paul says, “Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me.” We don’t know for sure whether fourteen years means fourteen years after the last journey he’d already mentioned in chapter one, or fourteen years after his conversion (verses 15 and 16 of chapter 1). It could be either way. The question here is which journey to Jerusalem is Paul describing? It’s really a matter of trying to harmonize Paul’s record with what took place in the book of Acts.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, but essentially there are two views. Either Paul is describing here what also took place in the book of Acts in chapter 11, or in the book of Acts in chapter 15. Luke describes several journeys (or two journeys, at least) by Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem; one in Acts 11, one in Acts 15.
Acts 15, of course, is the famous Jerusalem counsel, where Paul and Barnabas, along with Peter and James and the leaders of the Jerusalem church, met together to discuss this very question, the question of whether Gentiles must be circumcised in order to be saved. That is the issue in Acts chapter 15, and it is remarkable the similarities between Galatians chapter 2 and Acts chapter 15; so remarkable that some scholars believe these are the [same] events.
There are some pretty big differences, though. In Acts chapter 15 it’s a public event. Paul says here it’s private. Acts chapter 15 ends with the Jerusalem council actually making a decision, writing a letter, and sending that letter to the churches; Paul makes no mention of that letter here. There are reasons why Paul maybe wouldn’t have mentioned it, if that is indeed the event he is describing here.
At the end of the day, I don’t think it matters too much. There are good scholars with a high view of Scripture on both sides of this debate. So, the famous commentator J.B. Lightfoot, as well as modern scholar Moisés Silva, argue that this is describing Acts 15. F.F. Bruce, Douglas Moo, and others say no, this is describing an earlier visit, the visit in Acts chapter 11, and a private conversation that happened in that visit that Luke actually doesn’t describe. I slightly lean to that view, but it doesn’t matter too much when it was. What is clear is that a visit here did take place, and in this visit, as Paul describes it, they discussed this issue.
What did Paul do there? Look at verse 2. He says, “I went up because of a revelation and set before them, though privately before those who seemed influential, the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles.”
So this is what he did: he set the gospel before them. He was unpacking for them his understanding of the gospel.
The next question is, why did he do this? Why did he do this? You also see the answer to this in verse 2: he did it, he says, because of a revelation. This is the same word that Paul uses in chapter 1 to describe the special revelation given to him of the gospel. The gospel was revealed to him, he received it by a revelation from God. We know from the book of Acts that Paul sometimes received these special revelations from God or from Christ, where Christ would reveal things to him and then he would act upon them. That seems to have been the case here.
He also says that he did this “in order to be sure that he was not running or had not run in vain.” Now what does Paul mean by that? He says, “I was doing it to be sure I had not run in vain.” I think what he means here is that he did it to be sure that his work as an apostle, his evangelistic work, was not threatened, and so all comes to nothing. He’s concerned about that; he’s concerned about the fate of these churches, he’s concerned about these converts, he’s concerned about the potential of division in the church, and he doesn’t want his work to have been in vain.
So he goes to meet with the Jerusalem apostles, not to check out his gospel with theirs — that wouldn’t make any sense based on what Paul’s already said about how he received the gospel and the confidence he had in its integrity. He doesn’t go for that reason; he goes for unity. He goes to build unity with these other apostles, in order to safeguard his work.
And then, in verses 6 through 10 we see what happens, and I’ll just go through this quickly. We see four things.
(1) First of all, he says, “They added nothing to my gospel.” “They added nothing to my gospel.” Look at verse 6: “From those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)...” He doesn’t even really care that much that they’re apostles, but he says, “They seemed to be influential, but they added nothing to me. They added nothing to my gospel.” It just shows once again that the gospel he had received some 14 to 17 years before, that same gospel was the gospel that the Jerusalem apostles preached; they had nothing to add, but he was not dependant on them for it.
(2) Then secondly he says that they recognized his ministry and how God was working through him. You see this in verse 7: “They saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised.” It’s the same gospel, but the gospel being expressed in two different cultural contexts.
And then in verse 9 he says that James and Cephas and John, these pillars of the Jerusalem church, they perceived the grace that was given to Paul. They could see that God was working through Paul, and so they validate it; they recognize it; they say, “Yes, we can see God has his hand on Paul.”
(3) Then in verse 9, the third thing that happened is they gave Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship. If you ever wonder where we get that kind of churchy kind of phrase, “giving each other the right hand of fellowship,” and why Christians like to shake hands so much, it’s probably from right here. The right hand of fellowship. They, in other words, united together; they partnered together. That word fellowship carries the idea of a partnership. There’s a gospel partnership; they’re on the same team.
Now, right here I think is an important point to just pause for application, because there is a constant need for the church today to unite together. Not just the members in one church, but for churches to unite together in the fellowship of the gospel. We need to do that! We need to build partnership with other churches so that we recognize and the surrounding culture recognizes we’re on the same team, we’re preaching the same message. We do that even when there are some differences between us.
You see Paul doing that. There are differences between him and Peter. They believe in the same gospel, but their fields of context are different. The work situations are different; they’re working in different cultures. The gospel’s being expressed in slightly different ways. It’s the same message, but there are differences in their approach, and yet they’re able to shake hands and unite together.
I love that old statement; it’s often attributed to Augustine, probably he didn’t actually say it, but there’s kind of an obscure German theologian who did say it. But the saying goes like this: “In the essentials let there be unity, in the nonessentials let there be liberty, and in all things let there be charity.” Now that is a very important statement. That’s a statement that in some ways I’ve kind of built my own life and ministry around, and we’ve talked about this kind of thing often in our history here at Fulkerson for the last 14, 15 years.
We want our unity to be in the essentials of the gospel, and in nonessentials, in secondary and tertiary doctrinal issues or grey areas, there’s a lot of room for disagreement. So, for example, there are some non-negotiables for us. One of the non-negotiables is the person and the work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, he is God manifest in the flesh; he is fully God, fully man, two natures united in one person, and he died on the cross for our sins, he rose bodily from the dead on the third day: that’s non-negotiable. That’s non-negotiable. That’s right at the heart of the gospel.
But there are a lot of secondary issues that I have beliefs about, but you don’t have to believe the same thing in order for you to be in this church or in order for us to be friends, in order for us to be in fellowship together. So, it’s no secret, I lean heavily towards the Reformed end of the spectrum in my understanding of salvation, but you might be more Wesleyan, you might be more Arminian in your leanings. I disagree with you, but that’s not a reason why we can’t shake hands.
I’ve had an Arminian preach in this pulpit before; I mean a full-blown Arminian preach in our pulpit before, and did so deliberately, because I want us, like Whitefield and Wesley, partnering together in those early days of the Great Awakening, even though they had a falling-out later on. But in the early days of the Great Awakening, they are partnering together, and I think that’s right. I think that’s right. We should be able to unite with others who have a different way of understanding the secondary issues.
I love the statement of that Scottish professor John Duncan. He said, “I’m first a Christian, second a catholic, third a Calvinist, fourth a paedobaptist, and fifth a Presbyterian.” Now I would change the fourth and fifth points, and I would say I am first a Christian, second a catholic, third a Calvinist, and fourth a Baptist. Maybe I’d put an evangelical in there somewhere too.
But here’s the point, and when Duncan was asked, “Are these concentric circles?” he said, "No, it’s more like a tower." It’s like a tower, and at the base, the broadest foundation of the tower, is Christian, and then a little bit narrower, catholic, and then a little bit narrower Calvinist, and then a little bit narrower Presbyterian. He says, “The higher you climb up on this tower, the wider your outlook is.”
I think that’s right. I think that’s right. What that means is that we can join hands, we can lock arms, in fellowship with other churches and other believers who differ from us on secondary issues, but who agree with us on the essential issues of the gospel. We need to unite in the fellowship of the gospel.
(4) And then, before we move on to point number two, there’s one more thing that happened in this meeting. You see this in verse 10, and it’s almost like a shot out of the dark when you read through this. Verse 10: “Only they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.” I mean, they had this big meeting with all the apostles, or this group of apostles; they’re meeting together, they’re discussing the gospel, they’re working this stuff out, and one of the things that happens in that meeting that is so important that Paul brings up in the letter, it says, “They asked us to remember the poor.”
Now the reason for that is because the Christians in Jerusalem and in Judea were impoverished. There was a famine during that time; they really had needs. They really had needs, and these needs are so great that Paul actually goes on a campaign to raise money to help these Christians. Now you see him doing something like this in Acts chapter 11, where the Antioch church sends Paul and Barnabas, and maybe it’s the same event. The church sends them to Jerusalem to take a love offering, to take a gift.
But then in Paul’s letters, and you see this in various places in his letters in Romans 15 and 1 Corinthians 16 especially; you see Paul actually raising money, he’s taking an offering, to take back to the Jerusalem saints. He cared about meeting the needs of the poor, and it just shows us that right along with our concern for doctrine and for evangelism and for mission; right alongside that should be concern for meeting the needs of people. We don’t pit those two things against one another. We should be meeting the needs of the poor; we should care. It’s not optional icing on the cake for Christians or for churches.
Okay, so point number one is unite in gospel fellowship.
II. Fight for Gospel Freedom
Now, let’s look at verses 3 through 5, and we see the second thing: fight for gospel freedom. Verse 3, “But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek.”
Now this is the first mention of circumcision in this letter, and it’s one of the many mentions of Titus in Paul’s letters. It’s interesting; Titus never shows up in the book of Acts; he’s not named at all, but he figures prominently in the letter of 2 Corinthians, is mentioned again in 2 Timothy, and then of course there’s a whole letter from Paul that bears his name. Paul wrote a letter to Titus.
Paul here is describing something that happened in this Jerusalem meeting. He took Titus with him, and he would not allow Titus to be circumcised. Now here’s the situation, and you see it in verse 4. He says, “Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery, to them we did not yield in submission for even a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.”
This is important, because it has exactly to do with what’s going on in the Galatian churches. There are false teachers, Paul calls them here false brothers; they’re false brothers, they’re not true brothers, they’re false brothers, and they are saying Gentiles need to be circumcised in order to be saved. They essentially have to become like Jews if they’re going to be counted among God’s people.
Paul presents Titus here as a test case, and he said, “We wouldn’t allow it. We did not allow it." He was a Greek, he was not Jewish, and we would not allow him to be circumcised.
Notice how he describes here these false brothers. I thought this was really fascinating. Timothy George points out that Paul uses language here to characterize the activities of the false brothers that are words derived from political and military espionage that’s then applied to this conflict in Jerusalem. He says they were "secretly brought in," and it’s the idea of conspirators who were working kind of behind the scenes to hatch this secret plot.
It kind of reminds me of that character in the Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge. She’s always knitting behind the scenes throughout this book, and she’s working on a plot to bring down the aristocracy. That’s the idea here. It’s this group of people who are working behind the scenes to bring about some scheme, some plot. They’re secretly brought in.
Then it says they "slipped in," or in the NIV, “They infiltrated our ranks.” The New King James says, “They came in by stealth.” The New American Standard says, “They sneaked in.” So there’s something sneaky going on, right? They’re infiltrating. And then Paul says why they did it; he says they did it to “spy out our freedom and to bring us into slavery.”
So, Paul’s really concerned about this. He’s concerned about this intrusion of false teaching into the church that is compromising the gospel. That’s the concern. He stood against it, he would not allow Titus to be circumcised, and he’s saying to the Galatians, “You shouldn’t be either.”
Now why is this important? Why is this kind of thing important? Well, it’s important because when this kind of thing gets traction it’s a threat to the church. It’s a threat to the unity of the church. It’s a threat to the mission of the church.
Paul says, “I don’t want to have run in vain. I don’t want all my work to be for nothing.” The mission of the church was at stake here. The progress of the gospel to the Gentiles was at stake here. If all the Gentiles have to become Jews to become saved, then it threatens and it hinders the progress of the gospel.
And then it’s a threat to the gospel itself. The issue is not just, “What are these boundary markers for who’s in and who’s out?” but, “How do you get it? How do you get saved in the first place? How do you get justification?” That’s the issue, and Paul says to say that circumcision is necessary is to compromise the gospel itself.
So for all those reasons this is really important.
Now, that’s a lot of history. Let me just tease out some application for us now. There are several lessons for us to learn from this, and I want to point out four. Really quickly here, but four things this teaches us.
(i) Number one, it shows us that the unity of the church depends on the integrity of the gospel. There are a lot of people who want to see unity among religious kinds of folk, and they’ll even go so far as to say, “We should have unity with people who are not Christian at all.” So, coming together of Christians and Jewish people and Muslims and so on. So kind of the ecumenical approach. Theologically conservative Christians who believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead should be able to unite with theologically liberal Christians who don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead.
I don’t think that works. I don’t think that works, because the unity of the church actually depends on the gospel! You have to hold onto the gospel, and what’s important to see here is that there was an occasion here where Paul fought for the gospel. It wasn’t peace at any price; it wasn’t. There was something he had to fight for.
(ii) It shows us that the mission of the church depends on the message of the gospel. If you lose the message, you lose the mission.
(iii) It shows us, thirdly, that theological work is gospel work. Doctrine is important. Now I understand that we’re all wired differently. I understand that some of us are more academic in our orientation, we’re kind of abstract in our thinking, and we love it when we start getting into doctrine. And some of us are more concrete-relational, and it’s hard to kind of track with the doctrinal stuff, and what we really like is, “Tell me how to live, tell me what to do, give me a job, and let’s get ’er done!”
And you know what? We need both kinds of folks. But I’m just going to say right now to you concrete, relational kind of folks, don’t thumb your nose at doctrine, because churches that lose doctrine, after a couple of generations they either shut their doors or they become so compromised that there’s no gospel left. So doctrine’s important.
(iv) Here’s the fourth lesson: when it comes to doctrine, there is a time for peace and there is a time for war. I don’t mean literal war, but I mean there’s a time for battle. Remember how Jude says, “Earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.” There is a time for battle!
We have to discern — this is one of the things I think passages like this can help us with — we have to discern when is it a time for peace and when is it a time for battle. Let me just give you an illustration here.
Martin Luther. I’ve talked about Martin Luther a fair bit lately, because of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation and because Galatians was so important to Luther. Those of you who were in our Sunday school class downstairs today, we kind of did a whole lesson on Martin Luther.
Martin Luther is a wonderful example and a terrible example in different respects, and I think it’s only fair that when I laud my heroes here that I give you some of the warts as well. Luther was right; he was right to hold onto the gospel in contradiction to the Roman Catholic church, even though it got him excommunicated, and then to break. He broke with Rome. They kicked him out; they kicked him out, but it was because of what he believed. He was contending for the authority of Scripture over the authority of the pope, he was contending for a gospel of grace over and against a gospel of merit, faith plus works, grace plus merit; and Luther was right. He was right on that issue.
But then later on, Luther really blew it in some terrible ways. I’m not going to tell you all of them, but here’s one. Here’s one. Once the Reformed movement kind of got going, there was another Reformer named Zwingli who was in Switzerland; he was in Zurich. And Zwingli was doing the same thing Luther was doing; he was preaching through books of the Bible, he was studying his New Testament, he was trying reform to the town, and he agreed with Luther on a lot of things. But they differed on the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.
Luther had one view (I won’t try to explain it), Zwingli had a different view, and they could not come to agreement. There was actually a conference; it was called the Marburg Colloquy. Marburg Colloquy: it took place in October 1529, where Zwingli actually begged Luther through tears, with tears in his eyes he begged Luther, “Please just recognize us. Even though we disagree, we can’t come to unity on this, recognize us.” And Luther wouldn’t do it. He went so far to say, “Zwingli is not a Christian. He’s not a Christian.” Because they disagreed on how the Lord’s Supper works, their doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Luther blew it on that issue. He absolutely blew it.
We have to learn, I think, from Scripture and from church history, there’s a time for peace, there’s a time for war. Fight for the gospel; let’s do that. And let’s quit fighting about everything else. There’s a lot of stuff not to fight about. Fight for the gospel and let’s embrace others as brothers and sisters in Christ when the gospel is not at stake.
III. Walk in Gospel Truth
Alright; so, we’ve seen unite in gospel fellowship, fight for gospel freedom, and now thirdly, very briefly, we also need to walk in gospel truth. You see this in the second episode that Paul recounts in verses 11 through 14.
Look at what happened, verses 11 and 12: “But when Cephas [that’s Peter] came to Antioch…” Not Jerusalem now, they’re in Antioch. “When he came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles, but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party.”
Now again, this has to do with Jewish distinctives, Jewish food laws. In the Old Testament, as you know, there were certain foods that were unclean, that you were not allowed to eat. Bacon, for example. Not allowed to eat bacon. Not allowed to eat pork, right? And Jesus, in his ministry, Mark chapter 7, declared all foods clean, and then Peter in Acts chapter 10 had a vision from heaven. The sheet comes down from heaven, all kinds of wild animals in it, and the meaning of the vision is very clear: it’s all clean. You can eat with the Gentiles.
And Peter did! He did. Peter had bacon. He started eating with the Gentiles, and he was doing it at Antioch, until the really, really scrupulous kind of moral, theological police from Jerusalem showed up, and when they did that, he pulled back. He quits eating with the Gentile friends.
And Paul sees it, and Paul calls him out on it. In public, Paul calls him out, because he says he was condemned; he stood condemned. Verse 13 shows the consequences of the this. He says, “The rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.” That’s why Paul’s so concerned. He’s concerned that this thing will take root and it will bring division in the church.
Now, what’s especially interesting here is how Paul addressed this. He confronts Peter to his face, but then look at what verse 14 says. “But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel,” that’s where I get this phrase, walk in the truth of the gospel, “when I saw their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?’”
He called him out on it, and he essentially said, “You’re not being true to the gospel.” That’s how he corrects it.
This shows us two things:
(1) It shows us that even the apostles were under the authority of the gospel. Peter is an apostle, and Peter gets rebuked because he’s not being true to the gospel. Don’t ever think that we got the gospel from the apostles, okay? They were just messengers, but the gospel is divinely revealed, and when the apostles were out of step with the gospel they had to be brought back under. The church is not the source of the word. The word is the source of the church! We’re under the authority of the gospel, and all of us stand under that authority.
(2) Here’s the second thing this shows us: it shows us that even as Christians we have to learn how to walk in step with the gospel. It’s one thing to believe the gospel, right, but it’s another thing to bring all of your life into alignment with it.
I want to just give you this great quotation from Tim Keller; I’m almost done. Tim Keller has really been helpful for me on this as he talks about never getting beyond the gospel. Listen to what Keller says.
“Paul is showing that we never get beyond the gospel in our Christian life to something more advanced. It is not just the ABCs, but the A to Z of Christianity. The gospel is not just the minimum required doctrine for entrance into the Kingdom, but the way we make all our progress in the Kingdom. We’re not make right with God through faith in the Gospel and then sanctified and matured through mere moral effort.
“Faith in the gospel is also the way we grow. It is common to think the gospel is for non-Christians, but once we are saved we grow through work and obedience. But work that is not in line with the gospel will not sanctify; it will strangle. All our problems come from a failure to apply the gospel! The gospel changes every area of our lives. How? Since Paul speaks of being in line with the gospel, we can extend the metaphor by saying that gospel renewal occurs when we keep from walking offline, either to the right or to the left.”
Now there are lots of ways that that applies. Here’s just one: we go to the right if we become legalistic in our whole approach to the Christian life and we start determining who’s a good Christian and not, or who is a Christian at all or not, based on their moral performance and based on whether they dot their i’s and cross their t’s like we do. That’s legalism. It’s legalism if we start making judgments on that basis instead of on faith in Christ, life in the Spirit.
On the other hand, the other end of the spectrum, on the left is what we call license, or libertinism, and that’s where we say, “It doesn’t really matter how you live. If you believe in Jesus, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you live with your girlfriend before you’re married, it doesn’t matter whether you cheat on your income taxes, it doesn’t matter whether you have a holy life or not. It just doesn’t matter, because we’re all saved by faith in Christ anyway.”
You see, both of those are deviating from the line of the gospel. Luther actually said one time, and I thought this is good, this is right; he says we’re kind of like drunken peasants climbing on a donkey. We fall off one side, then we climb back on and we fall off the other side.
That’s kind of how Christians and it’s kind of how the whole Christian movement has been. Sometimes you see the church erring left, becoming too liberal, too worldly, not dealing with sin. And sometimes you see the church erring right; they’re so conservative, they’re so traditional, they’re so entrenched in their cultural forms that they really lose their grip on the gospel.
Well, I think Keller’s right; we have to keep in line with the gospel, and the way that we solve these problems is by asking ourselves, “Am I walking in step with gospel truth?” The whole Christian life is a life learning how to do that.
Now let me conclude in this way. We talked a fair bit here about Peter and Paul this morning. Both apostles, they both preached the gospel, they both were inspired by God to write letters that are included in our New Testaments, but there was a conflict between them, a conflict which eventually was reconciled. As you know, Peter in his second letter actually references “our beloved brother Paul” and the difficult things, hard to understand, that he wrote, but he includes them right alongside the Old Testament Scriptures.
Now, we don’t really know if this is true or not, but according to an ancient tradition, Peter and Paul both eventually arrived in Rome, and according to tradition they were executed in Rome on the same day. So there is a feast day in the Roman Catholic church, June 29th, dedicated to both Peter and Paul. Paul, according to church tradition, was beheaded by the emperor Nero, whereas Peter was crucified upside-down. We don’t know exactly what happened; that’s the tradition.
But what it shows us, whatever matter of truth there is in those accounts, it shows us that here were two men who were very different, they were very different, but they loved the same Jesus, they preached the same gospel, and they ultimately gave their lives for that cause.
The gospel is precious. It’s precious, and that’s why, like Peter and Paul, we need to unite in gospel fellowship, we need to fight for gospel freedom, and we need to walk in gospel truth.
Let’s pray.
Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for the gospel, the good news of what Christ has done for us, dying for our sins, rising bodily from the dead, ascending to your right hand, sending the Holy Spirit into our hearts to give us faith and then to transform us and to change us and make us more like Christ.
Thank you for the gospel; we want to hold onto it. We want to embrace all of our brothers and sisters in Christ who believe this gospel, and at the same time we want to fight for the preservation of the truth of the gospel, to defend every threat against it, to fight for its integrity. And we want to walk in line with the gospel.
So, as we’ve already sung this morning, we ask you now to search us and knows us, try us and see if there’s any wicked way in us; any way in which we are not walking in step with the gospel. Would you just search our hearts for wrong attitudes towards other believers and for practices that are hypocritical and inconsistent with the truth we believe? Search our hearts, and then renew us by fresh engagement with and remembrance of the gospel as we come now to the table. The table is a gospel sacrament, a gospel ordinance. It shows us in sacred emblem just what the gospel entails: Christ giving himself, body and blood, for us.
So meet with us now, Father, we pray through the Spirit of your Son; meet with us as we commune together, fellowship together around the gospel, around the table. We pray it in Jesus’ name and for his sake, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
