Commentary on Galatians (3)

Paul does not begin the body of his letter in the usual manner. He does not express gratitude to God for anything good that he has wrought in the readers, nor does he offer prayer so that God would enable them to make further progress. He does not commend his readers for anything that they have performed, believed, or maintained. This departure from the usual form accentuates the urgency and agitation that would characterize the rest of the letter.

Why is there this sense of urgency and agitation? It is because the Galatians are "turning to a different gospel – which is really no gospel at all." In other words, they are turning away from the message that Paul preached to them to another that represents itself as the gospel. But this different message is not the gospel at all, and as this same passage points out, there is really no gospel other than the one that Paul preached to them.

Paul stresses the exclusivity of the gospel from several angles. He writes that if "we" (including Paul himself), "an angel," or "anybody" should preach a different message to them, then let that person be "eternally condemned." The variation on the message is described in two ways: "other than the one we preached to you" and "other than what you accepted."

That is, if anybody at all – including any apostle or any angel – preaches a message other than the one Paul preached to them, or to say the same thing, other than the one the Galatians first received, then that message is a false gospel, and may that messenger be eternally condemned. There is no room for any deviation, any modification, any modernization, or any "improvement" to the original gospel message. There is no room for flexibility in its content. To say this in a positive way, this original message is accurate, precise, complete, and enduring, so that anything different from it is false doctrine.

It is true that the present controversy has to do with justification by faith, but the above must not be limited to this area in its application. This is because of the universal and comprehensive manner in which Paul asserts this principle of exclusivity. Paul preached the true gospel to the Galatians, and there is only one true gospel. Therefore, any deviation constitutes false doctrine.

All the elements in this exclusive path to salvation is fixed. A person cannot, without eternal consequence to his own soul, remove anything in the Christian system of doctrine that destroys the coherence of the gospel message. For example, one cannot make sense of justification by faith if the biblical teaching on sin is denied, rendering Christ's vicarious sacrifice and imputed righteousness unnecessary in the first place. Thus, in affirming the gospel that Paul preached to the Galatians, one must affirm what this message says about God, Christ, sin, faith, and so on.