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April, 2020
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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on August 18, 1985 But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. Galatians 1:8 WE ARE TEACHING FROM PAUL’S EPISTLE to the Galatians. Paul had founded the churches at Galatia on the good news of salvation by grace through faith alone; but certain men had come into the church, Judaizers, who were persuading the people that they could only be saved by performing the works of the law. That is why Paul had to admonish the Galatians, saying, “I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.” I could preach the message of grace and peace a thousand times, yet many people who were raised in the traditions of the church would still have trouble setting themselves free by taking the wonderful truths of God and living them. The message of freedom in Christ sounds strange only because so many preachers are preaching a message of condemnation. As Watchman Nee pointed out, the normal Christian life seems abnormal to most Christians today because they have distanced themselves from the central truths of the Scriptures. I preach certain messages repeatedly with the hope that eventually the words will be received with the meaning God intended, instead of being filtered through the church’s tradition. The church often falls into error because there are relatively few preachers who teach from the whole Bible and fewer who know how to read the original languages. I have heard preachers say, “The original Greek says this,” while they themselves can’t read a word of Greek! James misused the Scriptures in the same way that many modern teachers misuse them, by taking texts out of their context and distorting them. In Acts 15, James lost the dispute with Paul over whether or not Judaistic legalism would be forced upon the Gentile converts to Christianity. And in Galatians 2, Paul wrote that James had even sent men to Antioch who intimidated Peter into not associating with Gentiles, until Paul had to rebuke Peter to his face! James taught Christians in Jerusalem that circumcision and other legalistic practices were necessary for their salvation. In case grace and faith weren’t sufficient, he added the works of the law, such as observing certain days and not eating certain foods. James was no match for Paul’s ability to reason from Scripture; and although he was never really convinced by Paul’s teaching, he was forced to concede. James and those who sided with him at Jerusalem essentially concluded, “Okay, Paul, take your Gentile converts and go. Just remember to send us some money whenever you take up an offering! But you can take your uncircumcised Greeks and go somewhere else to preach your message of freedom. We’ll stay here with Peter and establish a separate stream of Christianity. Those who remain here under our influence will have to conform to the law of Moses.” Now it is obvious that either James was wrong or Paul was wrong. God did not send Christ to establish two kinds of Christianity. They resolved the question by separating, but James and his group continued to oppose Paul’s message. Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia was in direct response to those who had come from Jerusalem spreading false doctrine and causing a church he had established to turn from the way of faith. James would not bend, and he clung to his doctrine of grace plus works until he died. I would like us to consider that the message of James died at Jerusalem with his martyrdom, but the message of Paul conquered Rome and turned the world upside down! From the very beginning of the church, there have been people who think they can add something to the finished work of Christ. They are still with us today and they are still fighting against the truth that Paul taught. That is why I continue to lay the foundation over and over again: we are saved by grace, which means unmerited favor. Salvation is the gift of God for our faith. Faith is an Action, based upon Belief, and supported by Confidence. Those are the ABCs of faith. Faith alone is all that is required; we don’t have to do anything else! Why is it so hard for some people to accept the fact that they have nothing to contribute to their salvation? They are like the lame man at the pool of Bethesda in John’s Gospel. He had been there for so long that when Jesus came to heal him, he didn’t recognize who was speaking to him. He would have died in his crippled condition had Jesus not come along. There are people who want to believe in salvation by grace through faith alone, but somehow they still can’t make themselves believe it. Too many judgmental Christians go around carrying a magnifying glass to examine their neighbor’s behavior, figuratively speaking. I recently witnessed this when someone criticized a good friend of mine. This critic had his own ideas of how a Christian should behave. When he didn’t see my friend conforming to his own limited viewpoint, he concluded that my friend couldn’t possibly “be saved.” The critic assumed there should be a change in my friend that the critic could see and approve of. I share this story because it reflects an attitude typical of judgmental Christians. It ultimately boils down to this: they are willing to concede we are saved by faith initially, but if God is doing something in our lives, then there must be a visible change in our behavior. I have to ask, visible to whom? And how quickly should this change take place? And who gets to “approve” of the change? Christians conveniently ignore those questions because they self-righteously assume that if you’ve really “got it,” you will begin to look more like them! Frankly, I wouldn’t want to look like a cookie-cutter imitation of a freak! My Bible tells me God looks on the heart, while man only looks on the outward appearance. Paul was a scholar trained in the Greek language and he fully understood the meaning of pisteuo, the Greek word for faith used throughout the New Testament. Paul understood that you don’t have faith without including the element of action. But the action is not a disciplined effort to conform to God’s law or to perform “good works.” Rather, you grab hold of a promise of God. Even a child can tell the difference between trusting his father’s promises and trying to impress him with a perfect performance. James didn’t understand the meaning of pisteuo. In James 2:20, he wrote, “Faith without works is dead.” And he then postulated that true Christianity believes vertically in God and performs horizontally by works that can be seen by other men. He attempted to prove his point by taking texts out of context, using the examples of Rahab and Abraham in the Old Testament. He argued that Rahab was not saved because of her faith, by which he meant only her belief. He said that Rahab was saved because she performed the work of protecting the two Hebrew spies. Thus James concluded that faith alone will not save you. Likewise, James said that Abraham was not saved by his faith alone; his works saved him. Abraham took his son to the top of a hill to sacrifice him, therefore Abraham didn’t just have faith; he “worked’ by climbing the hill. This is marvelous rhetoric. Rhetoric uses facts, but draws conclusions not necessarily supported by the facts. Very few people will pause when they read James and question his rhetoric. Even though I am criticizing James, I don’t want to be misunderstood; James said many good things. I certainly don’t want to remove James from the Bible. I can preach God’s word from any book in the Bible, and even James can be useful as a medium of instruction as long as we separate out his opinions and wrongful twists on the truth that is in Christ; and this is possible by comparing his writings to the rest of the Bible. I am not objecting to James’ inclusion in the New Testament canon, even though it wasn’t until the fourth century that his epistle was included in the Bible. I would like us to consider that four hundred years is twice the span of existence of the United States. During that whole time, the church thrived and overcame the Roman Empire without the epistle of James even being considered in Scripture. It was the Third Council of Carthage in A.D. 397 which determined that James’ epistle should be added. I believe that this council decided to canonize the epistle solely because it was written by “the brother of the Lord,” and therefore it didn’t really matter what it said! We should also note that James didn’t even address his letter to the church, he wrote to “the twelve tribes” of Israel. Those who don’t know the Scriptures might be easily deceived by James’ arguments against Paul’s message. How then do we sort out the contradiction between the message of Paul and that of James? The controlling principle is found in 2nd Peter 1:20: “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.” That means we should not view any verse of Scripture as standing alone. We must consider it in the context of the unified whole of Scripture. We never find Paul misusing the Scripture, but James does so a number of times. We can forgive him for it; he may have done so out of ignorance. But when he is misusing the Scripture, it is hard not to think he might have been embittered with Paul and wanted to continue his argument with him. Rahab ran a whorehouse, and there is nothing in the Bible to suggest she ever got rid of her beds. In Joshua 2, two men were sent to spy out the land and they went into Rahab’s house. The wording of the original Hebrew text suggests that those spies didn’t go into her house initially to hide, nor did they go there to bear witness or to preach. They most likely went there for the same reason most men went there. And they didn’t tell her, “Thou shalt throw thy beds over the wall!” The woman was in business and they didn’t interfere. But they told her, “If you hang this red cord out of the window when we come to take Jericho, you and your house will be spared.” Bible scholars recognize the scarlet cord as a type of the shed blood of Christ. Pardon my bluntness, but that blood of Christ is sufficient to redeem and save even the madam of a whorehouse. Hanging the cord out of her window was not a work of righteous performance. Rahab trusted in the promise and acted on that trust. It took courage to hang that cord out the window, knowing it might be seen by her own people and not just the Israelites. That act of faith saved her and her whole household, whereas cleaning out her house would have saved no one. Understand the difference. James also entirely missed something about Abraham. It is a brief passage in the Scripture, but its meaning is clear if you read it carefully. In Genesis 22:5, Abraham spoke to the men who were with him before he went up the hill to sacrifice his son Isaac. He said, “Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.” That is the most significant line in the story. He knew he was going to go to the top of the hill, raise a knife and offer his son as a burnt offering, because that is what God had told him to do. But before he went up the hill, he told his men, “We will be back.” Abraham performed an act, but it was an act of faith rather than a legalistic work of righteousness. He trusted that even if he slew his son, God would keep the promises He had made that would be fulfilled through Isaac and his descendants. Abraham had faith that God, if necessary, would raise Isaac from the dead; and whatever happened, they both would come back down that hill. James’ argument that “faith without works is dead” is nonsense; there can be no faith without works because faith is a work. Faith is a courageous, determined grabbing hold of a promise of God whenever you confront a circumstance that defies what God has said. That is the right attitudinal fix of the man or woman of faith. We don’t need to complicate it. I heard someone express it very simply, saying, “There’s nothing I’m going to face today that the Lord and I can’t handle!” Throughout the Bible, God shows us the kind of works that save, and they are always acts of faith. The good news of the gospel is that there is now a new kind of righteousness, which is God’s gift for our faith. Paul calls it the power of God unto salvation. The Greek word translated “power” is dunamis, from which we get our word “dynamite.” You don’t have to shake a stick of dynamite and command it to explode. The explosion doesn’t come about as a result of any effort on your part. Just light the fuse and run like hell! The good news of the gospel lights a stick of dynamite in the Christian, and the flame that lights it is faith. The man or woman of faith looks at their circumstances and declares, “I will not give in! My circumstances defy what God has promised me, but I’m going to start viewing them the way God views them. And if I die in the process, I’m still going to hang on to what God has said. Damn these circumstances!” That is a work, but it is a very different kind of work than pleasing some self-righteous preacher or judgmental saint. Understand that when Paul said in Galatians, “There be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ,” James was included among the “some” that trouble and pervert! You might be thinking I don’t like James very much. The truth is that anyone who substitutes their own works for the finished work of Christ is God’s enemy and Christ’s enemy. They are perverts, which is what Paul called them. Then he said, “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.” Paul had very strong words for those who tried to turn the Galatian Christians away from the truth. The false teachers come around and tell us, “Well, if you really got saved, you’d do this or that.” It’s easy to be intimidated by self-righteous perverts who elevate themselves and their foolish standard. But Paul was God’s chosen apostle to the Gentiles, and he said, “Let him be accursed” which essentially means “Let him be God-damned!” That is what will happen to them if they continue in their perversion. It doesn’t matter how much they might approve of each other; when anyone substitutes his own works for Christ’s finished work as a means of getting into heaven, he has made Christ’s death of no effect. He has insulted the worth of God’s Son. The legalistic crowd simply can’t believe that Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient to cover all of our sins, including our future sins. They won’t let you believe it either. They cannot accept that God evaluates the price Jesus paid as sufficient to view us as though we were Christ, and they don’t believe that God has the right to make that determination. Christ is enough to cover it all! The penalty has been paid in full. God will give salvation to whom He will, and He doesn’t have to ask anyone for permission! People ask me, “Are you condoning sin? Are you saying that any kind of behavior is all right?” No. I am saying that falling short of God’s standard of holiness, which is the essence of sin, is covered by the shed blood of Christ. I fall short of that standard every hour of every day, and so do you. The Bible says, “All have sinned.” The most pompous and posturing preacher falls short, likewise the President and the Pope. Falling short is not “all right,” but it is covered. God alone gives us the power to change, and He alone determines how that change will work out in me and in you. No one else has the right to determine how quickly or to what degree the power of God will change someone. Paul said it again in Galatians 1:9: “As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.” Paul went on to say, “For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.” Too many Christians are still seeking to please men. I again use an illustration concerning my good friend, the one who was criticized. This same friend was once falsely accused of something and he was brought to trial. If he were convicted, the consequences would have been devastating. I would often speak to him during that time and encourage him by saying, “Don’t let go! God will see you through; just don’t lose your faith.” I remember the dark hour when the jury came in with a verdict that would have destroyed him. It was tough for him to keep his head up, but soon afterwards it was discovered that the jury had been compromised, and the judge declared a mistrial! Now let me pose a hypothetical situation. Suppose that my friend, under incredible stress, went out and got drunk during that last difficult week of the trial, just to get his troubles off his mind. Of course in this imaginary scenario, he had someone else to drive him home. Understand that I am not recommending getting drunk; I’m trying to shock you into the realization of the wonder of God’s grace. The Bible says, “be not drunk with wine . . . but be filled with the spirit.” Like Paul, I believe that all things are lawful, but I will not be brought into bondage to anything, except to God. But the point I am making is that even if my friend did get drunk, his actions would have been covered by God’s grace. He would be covered because of his faith, because of his “never let go” attitude that God would see him through the trouble. God’s promises in His word are manifold. In Joshua 1:5 and repeated in Hebrews 13:5 is the promise that He will never leave you nor forsake you. He promises in Deuteronomy 33, “As thy days, so shall thy strength be . . . The eternal God is thy refuge,” which means He measures out the strength you need for each day, He knows what is coming around the bend, and He will be on the corner before you get there. He concludes that series of promises with “underneath are the everlasting arms,” which means no matter how far you fall, God’s arms are waiting there to catch you. In Genesis 22:8, God promises He will provide for you. And Psalm 23 says the Lord is your Shepherd who will lead you. As long as my friend didn’t let go of those promises, any sinful drunken splurge would be covered. The same is true for you. The Scripture says that all the promises of God are yours to claim in Christ. As long as you hang on to God’s promises, your sins are viewed by God as already being paid for in Christ. That is the good news of the gospel! And as long as the connection of faith is maintained, the dynamite of God’s power remains in you. The paradox is that when the power of God comes to dwell in you, you will begin to be changed until you are truly a new creation, and you will no longer want to do some things you used to do. When you start acting in faith, God places His life into you. He puts your sins on a cross, and He views you as a finished product, complete in Christ. As long as you don’t let go, God’s life in you will change you, but when and in what way is no one’s business but God’s! Someone will ask, “Are you suggesting that God’s Spirit abiding in a man will keep him from getting drunk?” No, I am not. I am saying that if it is God’s viewpoint that the man should remain sober, His life dwelling in that man will start making the necessary changes from the inside. I am not convinced that our viewpoint is always right. I just want the tradition-bound people in the church to get off our backs! Like Paul, I say that if anyone comes preaching any other doctrine, be it an angel or otherwise, let them be God-damned! Don’t get caught in their trap lest God damn you too. Thank God we’re free! 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