Week 45 Galatians
Yesterday Paul mentioned a Different Gospel but didn’t spell out what it was until chapter three today.
Really, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since it already came up in Acts-Romans-Corinthians (even if it wasn’t called a Different Gospel). It was that Jewish people living with their OT-legal-tradition came to belief in the Lord and when they believed in the Lord they brought along their OT-legal-traditional beliefs with them.
Believing in the Lord plus practicing OT-legal-traditions wasn’t the big issue – Jewish people had to practice something. The big issue was that Jewish people (who believed) started telling non-Jewish people (who believed) that they had to start practicing Jewish OT-legal-traditions. Had to!
So in chapter three Paul talks about why OT-legal-tradition was not part of the Real Gospel. One of the tricky things about the Different Gospel was that it wasn’t an Absolutely Different Gospel. It was more like a Hybrid Gospel: a) believe in the Lord, and b) practice OT-legal-traditions. But Paul’s Gospel wasn’t a hybrid. It was just a) believe in the Lord.
Believing in the Lord is the one thing that brings you alive.
Note: Paul spent two-thirds of the chapter downgrading the OT-Law in a pretty unequivocal way – leaves me feeling that the Law is maybe: archaic, stupid, worthless, terrible, irrelevant, contrary to the gospel. (Paul pulls-in-his-horns in the last-third of the chapter and talks about the not-so-stupid functionality of OT-Law. No sense in going overboard.)