Summary:

The Galatian legalizers wanted them circumcised (v.12) to obligate them to keep the law (cf.5:3), “to make a fair show in the flesh” (v.12)—a fair religious show, like the “shew” of the law (Col.2:20-23), a show Paul calls one of humility. If you get enough people in your religious show, you can make a “fair” show in the flesh. “Fair” in this context means attractive (cf.Gen.6:2). People are attracted to religious shows with lots of people. The legalizers in Galatia did it to avoid persecution (v.12) by unsaved Jews (cf.IThes.2:14). But there’s always a lot of hypocrisy in religion, and Paul says there was among the legalizers too, who didn’t keep the law (Gal.5:13). They were just like the Pharisees whom the Lord lambasted (Mt.23:1-3). Paul did too (Rom.2:17,21,23).

The legalizers also wanted to circumcise the Galatians to “glory” or boast about how many followers they had. Paul says God doesn’t just dislike this, He “forbids” it (Gal.6:14). So Paul gloried in the cross instead, by whom the world was crucified to him. The world didn’t want Christ, so they crucified Him, and once Paul got saved he no longer wanted the world. In the context, he meant the religious world. He called the law worldly in Colossians 2:20,21 as well. We usually think of carnality when we think of worldliness (Tit.2:12), but there’s also a religious kind. It’s crucified to us when we are crucified with Christ (Rom.6:1-6), along with “the flesh” of carnal sins (Gal.5:24) and the “fleshly mind” of religion (Col.2:16-19). The law is called a humility there too, a “voluntary” one, i.e., one God doesn’t ask us for.

Paul adds that he was crucified to the world (Gal.6:14). He was just as dead to the world of religion as it was to him. If you asked the law’s unsaved leaders what they thought about Paul, they would have said, “Paul is dead to us.”

Circumcision doesn’t avail (v.15) or profit (cf.5:2,6) any-thing. It used to, back when Jews had the Scriptures the Gentiles didn’t have (Rom.3:1,2). But now Paul was writing Scripture to Gentiles! And “uncircumcision” didn’t profit either (Gal.6:15), for Paul’s epistles were written to Jews too (Rom.1:5), so Gentiles didn’t have anything they didn’t have. All that matters is the “new creature” God makes you when you get saved (Gal.6:15 cf. IICor.5:17). It was a rule you had to be circumcised to please God, but Paul made a new rule that you don’t (Gal.6: 15), and expects all men to “walk” by it (v.16). He talked about it more when he said he was part of the religious world of the law, but now counted it dung, and asks us to walk by this rule (Phil.3:5-16).

Paul extended “peace” to those who did (Gal.6:16), because the legalizers were troubling them (1:7), and trouble is the opposite of peace (Jer.8:15). He offers them “mercy” because they were being persecuted, and persecution is the opposite of mercy (Ps.109:16). Some say “The Israel of God” (Gal.6:16) is the Body of Christ. They say God cut ties with Israel when they killed His Son and made us “spiritual Israel.” But it’s not spiritual to imply God broke the promise of Jeremiah 31:37. Remember, “they’re not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Rom.9:6). So only saved Jews are true Israel (Rom.2:28,29). That means the Israel of God consisted of leftover kingdom saints. They were still around, circumcising and teaching the law, so Paul extends peace to them so they’d know he wasn’t condemning those things in them, only in the Body of Christ. And he extended them “mercy” for they were still being persecuted too (Acts 8:1).

It troubled Paul that the legalizers were troubling the Galatians (Gal.6:17). They wanted to “mark” the bodies of believers with circumcision, so Paul cited the persecution “marks” he’d incurred in his body trying to prevent that. He calls them the Lord’s marks because He’d be bearing them in His body if he were still here. Finally, the cure to legalism and carnality is grace, so Paul closes this epistle by offering it (6:18) as well as his epistles to the carnal Corinthians (ICor. 16:23).

Summary:

The Galatians were “taught in the word” by their teachers (6:6), but weren’t communicating any money to them (cf. Phil.4:15) to repay them. God always wanted the spiritual leaders who teach the Word paid (Deut.24:8 cf.12:19), with money and other “good things” (Gal.6:6); i.e., other things of value (cf.Gen.45:22,23).

If a church can’t afford a fulltime pastor, Paul encouraged spiritual leaders to work an outside job (Acts 20:17,18,34). That differs from under the law. When God gave the Levites no land to farm or raise animals on (Deut.14:27), that showed He didn’t want them working outside the ministry.

But the Galatians lost their “blessedness” (Gal.4:15), i.e., their thankfulness, when they fell for the law, so they went from wanting to repay Paul with their eyes for introducing them to grace, to not wanting to repay teachers anything for teaching them more about grace.

If Paul was still addressing the “spiritual” Galatians here (cf. 6:1), they too may not have wanted to pay their teachers, for they were teaching the law! But Paul’s advice to them as well would be to pay their pastor, but to also communicate the “good thing” of the grace message to him (IITim.1:13, 14). To threaten to not pay him until he taught grace would be legalism!

The legalizers were saying, “If you tell a Christian he’s not under the law, he’ll mock God and sin.” Paul says, “God is not mocked” when we sin under grace, for we still have to reap what we sow (Gal.6:7). For instance, Paul says not to get drunk (Eph.5:18). If you get drunk every day, you’ll die of liver disease. But that won’t be God judging your disobedience, like He did under the law. That will be you reaping what you sowed, i.e., reaping the natural consequences of your sin. Under the law, God judged Miriam with something that was not the natural consequences of her sinful rebellion (Num.12:1,10).

“The flesh” (Gal.6:8) is the part of you that desires to sin (cf.Eph.2:3). Fulfilling those desires is to “sow” to the flesh (Gal.6:8). If you do, you’ll reap “corruption,” which means the decomposition of your body by natural means (cf.Mt.6:19). You’ll also reap the natural corruption of your Christian testimony and your service for the Lord. But you’ll reap all that “of the flesh” (Gal.6:8), not of God.

Sowing to the Spirit means not sowing to the flesh. It involves sowing godliness and service for the Lord instead. Reaping “life everlasting” means reaping the benefits of the everlasting life you already have. I Timothy 4:8 promises that you’ll reap a blessed life in this present life, just as sowing to the flesh reaps corruption in this life.

If you’re not reaping a blessed life, just wait. Reaping takes time, so Paul says to keep sowing to the Spirit (Gal.6:9). You won’t reap a great life by worldly standards, but plenty of unbelievers have miserable lives—and they don’t have the Lord to see them through it. Verse 9 is the flip side of verse 7. There Paul says that just because God’s not punishing us as He did the Jews under the law doesn’t mean you won’t reap the evil that you sow. Here he’s saying that just because God’s not rewarding obedience like He did under the law doesn’t mean you won’t reap the good that you sow.

If you do good to “all” men (Gal.6:10) and not just your teachers, even unsaved men, you’ll be like God (Mt.5:44, 45). God did that as a “witness” (Acts 14:15-17), and so should we, when we have “opportunity.” We should do good to the household of believers too, to thank them when they bless us, as the Galatians wanted to do for Paul (Gal.4: 15)—but not just when others bless us (cf.Lu.6:33). We should be proactive in doing good to other believers and do good to them before they can do good to us.

Summary:

The word “fault” (6:1) here is one of the Bible’s many words for sin. But here, Paul is not talking about the persistent kind of sin practiced by the man in I Corinthians 5:1,2. The word “overtaken” (6:1) means this man was trying to escape the temptation to sin (cf.Ex.14:9), but it overtook him. Such a man needs to be “restored,” not disfellowshipped like the man living in persistent sin. That Corinthian, like the rest of the Corinthians, thought grace was a license to sin, and so they didn’t mourn their sin. A man trying to escape sin but overtaken by it is likely to mourn it and repent of what he did.

The word “restore” means to give a man back something he lost (cf.Gen.40:21). Saved sinners don’t lose salvation, they lose “the joy” of salvation (Ps.51:12). They begin beating themselves up for their sin. Spiritual believers who know Paul’s message of grace (Gal.6:1 cf. Cor.14:37) must do the restoring. We do it by assuring sinners that God is “satisfied” with Christ’s payment for their sins (Isa.53:11), so they should be too, and quit beating themselves up for sinning.

This restoration is to be done “in the spirit of meekness” (6:1), that of thinking a fallen brother is above you (IPet.3:1-5cf.Phil.2:3) rather than thinking you’re above him because you didn’t sin his sin. The legalists in Galatia were instead coming down on sinners like a ton of bricks, because they’d never consider that they might be tempted to sin their sins, as Galatians 6:1 says. But Paul says they might (ICor.10:12)!

The legalists were doing what the legalistic Pharisees did— they bound heavy burdens on men (Mt.23:2,4), i.e., rules that go beyond what the Bible said. Paul advises bearing one another’s burdens instead (Gal.6:2). This fulfills the law of Christ, that of loving your neighbor as the Lord loved you (Jo.13:34). Christ pleased not Himself when He bore the burden of our sins, so we should bear the “infirmities” of weaker brothers (Rom.15:1), i.e., the rules that go beyond what the Bible says that believers lay on themselves (Rom.14:2). We bear that burden by picking it up ourselves (Rom.14:21). Paul is drawing a contrast between legalists who lay the burden of rules that go beyond what the Bible says on men, to grace believers who take the rules that go beyond what the Bible says that men put on themselves and bear them themselves.

Legalists would never bear the burdens of others because they think they are above others, thinking they are “something” (Gal.6:3). Paul says they are “nothing” because they lack the love he’s been talking about (cf.ICor.13:2), the love for others that makes you fulfil the law of Christ by bearing their burdens. Legalists could use some self-examination, so Paul recommends some (Gal.6:4).He tells them to prove their own work (6:4), i.e., their own service for the Lord (cf.ICor.15:58), because someday the Lord will “try” it at the Judgment Seat of Christ (ICor.3:13). Paul tells them this because legalists always try or test the works of other believers, not their own, seeking to find fault with them, and they always end up biting and devouring one another (Gal.5:15). All because they try to work out the salvation of others, and not their own (Phil.2:12,14).

If the legalists would prove their own work, Paul says they’d have rejoicing in themselves (Gal.6:4), i.e., in their own personal rules that go beyond what the Bible says (Rom.14:22). Instead, they were rejoicing in getting others to follow their rules that went beyond what the Bible asks, like circumcision (Gal.6:12,13).

Paul concludes this chapter by reminding the Galatians that we “shall” all bear our burdens, i.e., bear it to the Lord’s Judgment Seat, where “every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:10,12), so we should focus on working out our own salvation, and not that of others.

A video of this sermon is available on YouTube: The Spiritual Galatians (Galatians 6:1-5)

Summary:

“Lust” means a strong desire (Eph.2:3), and when we lust for the sins of the flesh, the Spirit lusts “against” us (Gal.6: 1). He wants something “contrary” or opposite (cf.Acts 27: 4) for us. This sets off a battle Paul says we “cannot” win (Gal.6:1)—if you put yourself under the law like the Galatians did! Not even Paul could win then (Rom.7:15-24)!

That’s because the law riles sin up (Rom.7:5) and revives it if it starts to nod off in your life (7:9). The way to have victory over sin is not by the law, it’s by walking after the Spirit (Rom.8:4; Gal.5:16). That involves being “led by the Spirit” (Rom.8:14) as opposed to being driven by the law.

The law drove the Jews by telling them “Thou shalt” and “shalt not,” and punishing them if they disobeyed. But it can’t drive us to obey God, for He is no longer punishing us if we don’t.

Instead, the law “worketh wrath” (Rom.4:15) the same way fathers can provoke children to wrath (Eph.6:4). Spanking doesn’t do that; a father’s rules anger a child. Spanking provokes fear. But then, if you don’t spank him, all that’s left is the anger he feels for your rules. And now that God is not spanking us, all that’s left is the anger we feel for His rules due to our fallen Adamic nature. So remember that we are led by God’s Spirit instead (Gal.5:18).

Legalists say no real Christian could commit sins like fornication (Gal.5:19), and if he does, it proves he’s not saved. That’s a dispensational error based on Matthew 7:16-20, words the Lord spoke to people heading toward

Pentecost, where they’d be filled with the Spirit and couldn’t sin (Jo.3:9). If they did, it proved they weren’t saved (v.10). You can’t know a man by his fruits today though. If it were not possible for us to commit fornication, Paul wouldn’t’ve had to tell us not to (Eph.5:3). Any of us can commit any sin.

Why would Paul say if you’ve ever committed fornication you can’t inherit God’s kingdom (Gal.5:19-21)? Well, he said the same thing to the Corinthians, but added “ye are washed…justified” (ICor.6:9-11). Now you’re no longer a dirty fornicator, you’re a washed saint (ICor.1:2) who’s capable of committing fornication. God has given you a new identity that can’t sin. Only your old man can (Rom.7:20). But you shouldn’t sin just because you know you’re immune from the wrath of God that will fall on men because of their sin (Eph.5:3-7). That’s why Paul uses words like tell and told to say you can’t inherit the kingdom, not warn (Gal.5:21).

While the new you can’t sin like unsaved men can, unsaved men can’t bear the fruit of the Spirit like you can (Gal.5:22). When they are “longsuffering,” it is a work of iniquity (cf. Mt.7:22,23). They can’t bear the fruit of the Spirit because they don’t have the Spirit. Good works done by unsaved men are works of their self-righteous flesh. Remember, God warned Adam not to eat of the tree of “good and evil.”

The law makes us sin because our fallen nature wants to defy God’s law, but there’s no law against the fruit of the Spirit (Gal.5:23), so there’s nothing in our nature to make us want to bear it to defy God’s law. We must choose to bear it.

Your flesh may feel alive and able to lust after sin, but it was “crucified” with Christ (Gal.5:24) when your old man was crucified with Him (Rom.6:6) when you got saved. That’s how you got your new identity. When your old man died, God raised you with Christ (Rom.6:4) and gave you a new man. All you have to do is act like him (Col.3:3-5).

Since it was the Spirit who made you one with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection (ICor.12:13), you “live” in Him (Gal.5:25), i.e., you have your eternal life in Him. If so, verse 25 says you should walk in Him. If you put yourself under the law instead, you’ll be “desirous of vain glory” (v. 26), i.e., desiring men to tell you how well you’re keeping the law, or “envying” those you think are keeping it better.

A video of this sermon is available on YouTube: The Holy Spirit’s Desire (Galatians 5:17-26)

Summary:

The “liberty” we are “called to” (v.13) is our freedom from the condemnation of the law (IICor.3:9), Paul says not to use this liberty as “an occasion to the flesh.” The “flesh” here is the part of you that wants to do the sinful “works of the flesh” (Gal.5:19). So Paul is saying: Don’t use your freedom from the law as an excuse to break the law.

“Serve one another” by love instead (v.13). Paul explains what that means in verse 14, where he says the law of the 10 commandments is fulfilled in the command to love one another. If you love a man, you won’t lie to him or steal from him. The Jews did those things by law because they were a kingdom, and kingdoms must have laws. We do them “by love” because we are a body, the Body of Christ, and members of a body serve the others because they love them. Sinning against them would do them a disservice, not a service.

The Lord said the law was summed up in two words, love God and your neighbor (Mt.22:36-40). But today, God dwells in believers (ICor.6:19,20), not in Solomon’s temple as He did under the law, so in loving your neighbor you’re also loving the God within him. “Neighbor” can mean an intimate, as in the intimate members of a family.

Paul was telling the Galatians this because they’d fallen into biting and devouring one another (Gal.5:15) instead of being willing to serve one another like they used to (4:15). You see, putting yourself under the law as they did always makes you feel “holier than thou” (Isa.65:3-5) and judgmental of others. I.e., “I was in church on the sabbath day (cf.4:10), where were you?” This causes others to envy your supposed holiness (Gal.5:26), which provokes them, as Paul says.

Legalists mean well. If they see you struggling with adultery, they encourage you to cite “Thou shalt not commit adultery” to deal with the temptation. But due to the fallen nature we inherited from Adam, that just makes us want to sin all the more (ICor.15:56). The way to deal with the temptation to sin is to “walk in the Spirit” instead (Gal.5:16).

That has to do with being “led of the Spirit” (Rom.8:14). Matthew says the Lord was led of Him (Mt.4:1) because he presents Him as a king. But Mark says the Spirit drove Him (Mark 1:12,13) because Mark presents Him as a servant. It’s Mark who tells us He didn’t know the day of his coming (Mark 13:26,32) because servants don’t know what their masters are doing (John 15:15). You drive servants to do things by giving them orders and punishing them if they don’t obey. But you can only lead a king to obey you.

Children are also ordered and beaten if they disobey (Pr.22: 15) because they differ nothing from a servant (Gal.4:1). Under the law, God treated the children of Israel as servants, ordering them to do things and spanking them with the “rod” of bad health and bad wealth if they disobeyed. But we’re not under the law (Rom.6:15), so we’re no longer servants, we’re sons (Gal.4:3-7). And you get adult sons to obey you by leading them with instructions and hoping they’ll follow your lead.

And that’s how the Spirit leads us as God’s sons, by instructing us through His Word, and hoping we’ll follow His lead. Paul says if you’ll walk in the Spirit, following His lead, “ye won’t fulfill the lusts of the flesh” (Gal.5:16). It doesn’t say you won’t have them. It says you won’t fulfill them.

Does it always work? No, but it is the only thing that has a chance of working. Walking in the law sure won’t work, for the law only makes sin more sinful (Rom.7:13). It looks like it would help you say no to sin, with all of its “thou shalt not’s. But gasoline is a liquid, so it looks like something that would be good to put out a fire. But as you know, it only makes a fire worse, and the law only makes sin worse. Walk in the Spirit instead by following His lead.

A video of this sermon is available on YouTube: Don’t Rise To This Occasion (Galatians 5:13-16)

Summary:

Paul compares the Christian life to running (5:7). He usually compares it to walking (Col.1:10), i.e., walking in the same grace that saves us (Col.2:6). But the Galatians had learned to walk in grace so well that they’d broken into a run.

Then someone “hindered” them (Gal.5:7), a word that means stopped in that context (cf.IThes.2:18). Paul wanted to know “who,” because in so doing they stopped them from obeying the truth (Gal.5:7). The law used to be the truth, so God told the Jews to walk in it (Ex.16:14). But now grace is the truth, so walking in the law makes you disobedient to God’s truth.

Paul went on to point out that the God who called them (5:8 cf.ICor.1:9;IIThes.2:13,14) into grace (Gal.1:5,6) wasn’t the One who hindered them, so it must have been Satan. He’s an angel of light (IICor.11:14,15), and “the law is light” (Pr. 6:23). So Satan has his demonic ministers teach “leaven” (Gal.5:9), i.e., the doctrine (cf.Mt.16:6,11,12) of the law.

Leaven is like yeast though, and always spreads and leavens the whole lump of bread dough. Once Satan introduced the leaven of the law in Galatia, it spread throughout Christianity for the next 2,000 years. That’s why churches must oppose the law like they oppose sin. Sin will spread in an assembly too, so in speaking about the fornicator in Corinth, Paul also told the Corinthians that “a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. But legalism must be just as dangerous, if Paul uses the exact same words to warn us about the law.

Paul doubted the Galatians would ever come out of legalism (Gal.4:20), but he had “confidence” in them “through the Lord” (Gal.5:10)—just as he had confidence in the Corinthians through Him, that they would come out of carnality (IICor.2:3;7:16;8:22). And since Paul’s words were actually God’s words, that means that however deeply you’ve fallen into sin or legalism, God is confident you’ll come out of it.

Paul must have had no confidence in the legalizer though, for instead he said he’d just have to “bear his judgment” (Gal.5:10). That shows Paul knew he wasn’t saved, for after the Jerusalem Council, saved Jews knew that men saved by grace without the law didn’t need to be put under the law.

Paul primarily meant that he’d have to bear his judgment someday in hell. But he may have been thinking of inflicting some judgment on him personally, the way he did with an unsaved man in Acts 13:10,11. Why else would he ask who the man was twice (Gal.3:1;5:7).

Next, the legalizer was saying that Paul preached circumcision and the law, and the Galatians believed it because he circumcised Timothy while in Galatia (Acts 16:1-3). But he didn’t do it because the Jews thought he couldn’t be saved without it. He did it because the Jews wouldn’t let him into their synagogues without it, and Paul chose Timothy to “go forth with him” into those synagogues to preach the gospel. That’s an example of I Corinthians 9:20-23.

But that’s a lot different than preaching circumcision and the law. Paul dispels that rumor by pointing out that if he preached that, the Jews would stop persecuting him because his message would cease to offend them. It offends people even today when you tell them you can be saved without the law!

Earlier Paul made it sound like there was only one legalizer (Gal.5:10), but the word “they” (v.12) shows there were more. It had spread like leaven! He wanted them “cut off,” a play on words. If you weren’t circumcised in time past, you were “cut off” from God’s people (Gen.17:14). Paul is saying he wanted those legalizers cut off out of the assembly, like the leaven of the fornicator in I Corinthians 5:2,13.

I once taught that Paul wished them castrated, making a play on words on circumcision. But castrating a legalizer would not stop legalism from spreading, and that’s the context.