Three centuries before the Apostle Paul lived and suffered, there was a migration of Celtic tribes from Gaul. These, passing across Europe, settled in Asia Minor (now Turkey), and gave their ancient name to their new home (Galatia simply being a corruption of Gaul-[in]-Asia); thus France and Turkey were first linked in human history.
In the light of this, it is interesting to notice how the familiar traits of the modern French character may be traced in this epistle, written to their forefathers. Chivalrous and self-sacrificing love, a tendency to fickleness, revelry, and vainglory, may all be found in Galatia as clearly as in Paris today (4:15; 1:6; 4:18; 5:21, 26).
To these districts came Paul, preaching “his gospel” with wide acceptance and success. But shortly after he had left, other teachers entered and sowed tares in God’s wheat fields, and the Galatian churches found themselves facing the dire and dual peril of a mutilated gospel, taught by time-serving teachers.
On hearing this, Paul came to the rescue, and by this epistle flung the whole weight of his power into the task of proving, first, his own consistency in contrast with the vacillations of Peter, the instability of Barnabas, and the cunning carnality of those who would pervert the gospel of Christ, and after devoting two chapters to this, he then reveals the central place of the Cross in the faith of the Church, as well as in the salvation of the soul.
I want to write of his interpretation of the Cross, as given in this epistle (“a letter about Calvary”), because the same peril that threatened Galatia is overshadowing modern Church life, and today even good men misunderstand the Cross, while bad men emasculate and degrade its teaching until we are left with merely “a supreme example of self-sacrifice.”
The truth is that, while the Resurrection is the highest physical miracle, the Cross is the deepest moral wonder in history; it is not merely a martyr bearing appalling bodily suffering, not simply a Man offering Himself as a target for Satan, nor even He who was God, manifest in Manhood, suffering the awful sense of moral distance from One whose Fellow He had been from all eternity and thus experiencing spiritual woe.
The Cross contains all these, but, more profoundly still, we see in it an ordered crisis in the Godhead. On the one hand God in unsullied holiness, on the other, Deity standing in the place of sin. It is righteousness in God demanding satisfaction and a sacrifice, love in God freely offering itself as a victim. It reveals the Father suffering as, from the heights of His holiness, He surveys the sorrows of His Son; and that Son suffering as He is made sin, and from the depths of His abasement, looking up to see a darkened Heaven and Himself forsaken.
It declares that God in Christ loved me so deeply that He gave His Son to die for my sake, and that that Son entered the atmosphere of the curse, dying there in the dark, and then rose in triumph in the power of an indissoluble life. So swiftly does one follow the other that one is reminded of an arctic sunset, in which the light dies away in the west and the watcher turns to the east to find that the first shafts of dawn are already rising on the horizon.
The reception of such a message must involve an earthquake in the experience of its recipients, and my aim is to show how the Cross readjusts certain relationships of life in ways which appear to have been in the mind of the author of this letter.
The Cross as a Coronation Stone for Christ (2:20)
I cannot remember where I read or heard the above phrase, but it seems to enshrine the idea of this verse. Turn to the story of the “days of His flesh” and see how three times He deliberately chose the Cross–at His baptism, when He was numbered with the transgressors; in Luke 9:51, when He set His face to go to Jerusalem; and again in John 12:27 when He declared “for this cause came I unto this hour.”
Again, three times He was tempted to turn aside and to take a short-cut to glory, namely, in the desert, at Caesarea Philippi, and in Gethsemane; in these cases the voices of Peter, Satan, and His own will were heard, but He held on His way, rejecting the apostle’s well-meant words, the seductions of Satan, and choosing the Father’s will and not His own.
To those who have worshipfully weighed these things, only one course is open, and that is to abdicate life’s throne (1 Pet. 3:15, rv) and to crown Him as Lord: as we descend the steps He ascends, and Tennyson’s longing finds its fulfillment:
“Oh that a Man might arise in me, That the man I am might cease to be!”
Augustine tells us how, in the early days of his Christian life, passing along the streets of Milan, he saw one of the companions of his old dissolute days coming towards him. Immediately he began to run in the opposite direction; his former friend gave chase, crying, “Augustine, why do you run? It is I!”
Looking back over his shoulder, he called to her, “I run because it is not I.” He knew that Christian life means the substitution of Christ for self, and that is still our highest wisdom.
Are you afraid that an enthroned Lord would make demands upon you that would shatter your life plans and crush your cherished hopes and ambitions? This may well be if these are unworthy ones, but while I can say nothing as to what He may do, I know this:
“He is stronger than the strongest,
He’s far better than the best,
And His love has lasted longer,
It has stood the hardest test.
The sinfulest may trust Him,
Nor their welcome ever doubt,
For He’s pledged His faithful promise
That He never will cast out.”
He is tenderer than the tenderest,
He’s the fairest of the fair;
He will be thy soul’s Defender,
Thou mayest rest in safety there.
Though fierce enemies surround you,
And you sink in life’s alarms,
He will surely place around you
His strong, everlasting arms.”
The Cross as a Caustic for Sin (5:26)
I use the word caustic in its ordinary medical sense, as a corrosive substance used to destroy diseased tissue (for specimens of such tissue, see vv. 19-21).
In the days of John Bunyan’s imprisonment there lived at Bedford a wicked old man, named Ned Bratt, with his equally evil wife, and they tell us how one day, when the justices were sitting in the Bedford Assizes, there was a great tumult at the door of the court, and presently old Ned Bratt and his wife walked in hand-in-hand, groaning and weeping, and although a case was being tried begged to be allowed to ease their conscience by telling their crimes to the court; and on permission being given they told how they had been to the prison and had seen a certain tinker there, and how his words had so pricked their hearts that they must immediately cleanse themselves of their sins by confessing to murder and a whole heap of black and evil stuff.
When we stand in the presence of John Bunyan’s Lord, and in the clear light of His Cross, we, too, are naked and ashamed as we learn that not hammers, nor nails, nor Roman soldiers held Him to the tree; that these were merely blind material instruments of His agony, but that it was love for me and hatred for my sins that brought Him to such a place; then, I say, I begin to hate sin, and apply the burning caustic to all life’s “diseased tissues,” and rejoice that “sin shall not have dominion over me” ” I live, and yet not I.”
The results of this are given in the immediate context of our passage; in the lives of those who have crucified the flesh is produced the fruit of the Spirit, and they “walk in the Spirit .”
I remember how, in South America, on one occasion some engineering works had been begun, but owing to malaria had to be abandoned; the ground was thickly wooded forest land, and before leaving the engineers set light to a broad belt of land, hoping thus to cleanse the infected area, and for months the brushwood was smoldering; about two years after the workmen returned to resume operations and were surprised to find the blackened ground covered with a new and unknown type of plant with an exquisite blue flower.
Specimens were gathered and forwarded to the Botanical Gardens at Washington and elsewhere, but no one could identify this apparent product of the action of the fire. How many times have I seen this in the realm of the soul, a crucified, cauterized life giving birth to new flowers and fruit of the Spirit.
The Cross as God’s Frontier between the World and the Christian (6:14)
Here Paul reproduces the scene of Calvary and shows us three Crosses: one, that of our Lord Jesus Christ in the center; by its side another on which the world is hanging like the impenitent thief, nailed there by the hands of Paul; finally, on a third is seen Paul himself, crucified by the world and looking across to His Lord. The life of Paul was that of a crucified man, and there lay the secret of his success; too often ours is not. We try to make the best of both worlds, plowing with the ox and the ass in one yoke, and sowing our fields with divers seeds.
And yet, thank God, here and there surrendered hearts are finding out the reality of Christ’s Lordship and, pushing back the near horizon, cede more and more territory to Him and less to the world. Once we wrote our letters when and how we would, now we have to bow our heads first and ask what He wants us to say; once we read what we pleased, now He stands over against our bookshelves; once we went to preach wherever we willed, but now we can only go where He sends us; once we ate according to our appetite, now we remember the restraint of His presence; once we built up our businesses according to the world’s standards, now we are content to be undersecretaries to His praise.
There is a price to pay for these deep joys. Thomas said to His Lord, “Except I see the marks of the nails in His hands I will not believe;” and the world says it still, not to Christ, but to Christians, and she has a right to demand these “marks of the Lord Jesus” in us (v. 17). Our faith is not a mere genial picnic, begun and ended with a reckless forgiveness of the past, but a crusade in which our Leader demands unqualified and unreserved obedience.
There is no future for any movement unless it can count on the support of people who are willing to suffer for it, and we must know where we stand ; if we are able to trust Him and one another we may expect times of costly blessing, but “if one member suffer (or sin), all the members suffer with it.”
“Dole not thy duties out to God,
But let thy hand be free;
Look long at Jesus, His fair love,
How was it dealt to thee ?
The perfect way is hard to flesh,
It is not hard to love;
If thou wert sick for want of God
How quickly would’st thou move?”