WARNING:PREACHY (and sort
of longish. Oh! and quite likely a little offensive)
Galatians 1:6-9
6 I am astonished that
you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of
Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 which is really
no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are
trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an
angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you,
let them be under God’s curse! 9 As we have already said, so
now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you
accepted, let them be under God’s curse!
In Matthew 21, Jesus went into
Jerusalem, the event that the Bible titles as The Triumphal Entry. I
reject this title and description even though it is written in the Bible (GASP – I know!). But really, how
triumphal is it that the people who were calling out praise and welcoming
Jesus this week, were the very same people who were calling for him to be
crucified (Matt. 27:22) in the very next? (One of these days I will write
about this and why people who love the study of Revelations and End Times
things should spend some time with this text.) So in Matt. 21 Jesus
is going into Jerusalem where the people praise Him and lay their cloaks or
palm branches along his path, then, in a week’s time these same people turned
and no longer sang his praises, for they were calling for Pilate to crucify
him. This event was driven by the expectations of the people. The
people expected Jesus to come in as a warrior king (like King David of old) and
free them from the oppression of Roman rule, but once they realized Jesus was
not going to fill their expected role as King they took cue from the Jews and
called for him to be crucified. Sort of why Judas had a problem with him.
I bring this up because we humans
always have Expectations, and when the Reality of those Expectations
are not satisfied we become Disappointed. Thus the equation D = E+R
(Disappointment= Expectations + Reality).
In Galatians 1, Paul is astonished
that the Galatians are turning from the original gospel they received from him,
that someone else was coming in and confusing them with another non-gospel
message. It seems plausible to me that the Galatians were so quickly
turning because they may have had Expectations that were not being met
by the gospel Paul preached.
I think this sort of thing is
epidemic among people today. I cannot tell you how many people I know who
were active in the church but eventually decided to scrap their faith
completely. While I do not know what gospel these friends received at
first, too many of them have turned from Jesus altogether and have rejected the
true gospel today.
So what is the true Gospel message
that Paul is referring to? We find it in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4;
“3 For
what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for
our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried,
that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…”
The true gospel is the death,
burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I think there is much Disappointment
among converts to the faith, because they Expected something of becoming
a Christian that apparently didn’t happen. So people either leave their
faith all together, or they seek out a preacher/church that will tell them what
they want to hear. We people love agreeing with anyone who agrees with us, regardless if what we think is correct or not.
While I cannot know what the Galatians
were hearing then, I will broach one
of the prevalent non-gospel ideas of today. This is the idea that “all dogs go to heaven”.
It is popular to believe that if we have
ever walked forward at a Billy Graham crusade, raised our hand at a church
youth camp meeting, or can locate our baptismal certificate from when we were
babies, that we are heaven bound when we die. This is a damnable idea
that strips Jesus of the very efforts of His blood stained cross.
Everyone is in heaven?
Seriously, the very idea strips our
Lord of the victory that He bought with his passion. The very concept makes Jesus inconsequential because
we Expect that God just automatically gives our deceased loved ones a
place in His heaven. We forget the “do not judge” (Matt. 7) where our
loved one’s eternal destinies are concerned. When our loved ones die, it
often just makes us feel better to believe in our own thinking about the matter – which
is not the gospel at all.
I do a lot of funerals, and most
people's thinking seems pretty much the same to me. ‘The deceased are
going to be waiting for us in heaven when we die.’
One day I did a funeral for a man
whose wife and mistress were in the same room. In the mind of the wife,
the man was a bastard who deserved to rot in hell, and in the mind of the
mistress, he was a great man who would meet her again one day in heaven. What is clear to me is that nobody thinks to ask Jesus His thoughts? No, people are just happy to assume that God
thinks like we do. And that just is not Reality.
This is where the true gospel of God comes in.
1. Jesus died on the cross to destroy
sin and death. This was His purpose for being born. Jesus was born
to make a path for us humans to have a relationship with God again – to destroy
the sin barrier from the days of Adam.
2. Jesus was buried. When He was
buried, it appeared that it was over, the devil actually had the final
say. Sort of like how it feels to us when our loved ones die, and that
relationship is painfully and finally finished in this life.
3. Jesus rose from the dead. When
He rose again, there was hope again, that there was life, right now, for all of
eternity with God the Father. Sin and death were at long last destroyed,
for the dead man had rose back to life thus proving His words true- "Relationship with the God of the universe was possible again."
The above is the gospel message, but
it has a caveat. The gospel requires a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit of Jesus in this life, right now (John 14). Too
often, we people want so bad to see our deceased loved ones again that we ignore this part. And trust me, I get it.
I have lost loved ones to death; it
would be very easy for me to ignore the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus in
order to believe that my loved ones are in heaven just waiting for me.
The problem with this notion is that it's just
not honest. The truth is that I am too human and too ignorant to know
the Reality of another man’s eternal destiny, so I am relegated to just
trusting that Jesus is a righteous
and fair judge. My real position is to simply just trust Him. Am I willing to
trust Him even if my loved one’s eternal destiny is not as I Expect?
That’s the question. It is the true gospel of Jesus that elicits my faith, here and now, it is a Reality that is rooted in what is true, and not simply contrived by
me or my own imagined Expectations for the future. It is an active trust in
a real savior who is living and present in my everyday life through the Holy
Spirit of God; a faith of Realty.
And yet, many people will reject
this Gospel simply because accepting it requires a dying to self. Many will
reject the true gospel for many reasons, but mainly because we cannot get past
our own imagined thinking about Reality and refuse to accept anything other than what makes sense to "me".
The death, burial, and resurrection
of Jesus, is the true gospel that Paul was preaching to the Galatians, and this
is the gospel that you and I need to hold tight to. If we don’t, I fear
that we will know much Disappointment with Life which is caused because
the Reality will prove not to meet our own Expectations.
I pray that as we all go through our faith journeys, that we will recognize a real faith in the living Jesus who conforms us the reality of this life.
Philippians 4:4-7
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