HARMONY IN DIVERSITY

Gal. 2:9 ... "Recognizing the grace that had been given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, so we might go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised."

      By the middle of the first century, Christianity had grown out of its cradle in the land of Judaism and spread into far distant Gentile countries. Paul had been the foremost evangelist in preaching the gospel in such places as Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia. Although communities of Jews with their synagogues existed in most of these places, the vast majority of the people were Gentiles who embraced the religion of idolatry. Paul and his assistants would go first to these Jews, preach in their synagogues, and try to convert them to Christ. The majority of them, however, rejected the apostle and expelled from their midst anyone who had obeyed the doctrine he taught. Then Paul would appeal to the Gentiles, and their response was usually overwhelming.  In many large cities congregations were established which grew to considerable size in a rather short time. With each passing year the Gentile segment of Christianity grew larger, until at some point it became obvious that Jewish Christians had become the minority in the church.

      It is little wonder, then, that jealousy set in among the Jews toward the Gentiles, and a spirit of rivalry began to threaten the unity of the church. Paul became an object of hostility among the Jewish brethren, some of whom began to make charges against him. The problem became so acute that finally a great convention of apostles, elders, and other influential people in the church was held in Jerusalem to address it. Paul and Barnabas came from Antioch to attend and to present the case of the Gentile brethren. (This convention is reported both here by Paul in Galatians 2 and by Luke in Acts 15.) These two missionaries explained the nature of their work and outlined the doctrine they were preaching, especially emphasizing the multiplication of congregations and the large number of converts. When James, the Lord's half-brother, Cephas (Peter), and John, who appeared to be the three "pillars" of the Jewish side of the church, heard all this, they were entirely satisfied that God had indeed manifested His grace unto Paul and Barnabas and that the marvelous success of the Gentile side of the church was due to the very power of God.

      At this point Paul reports that these influential men, two of whom had been personally with Jesus thoughout His ministry, "gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship." Here is a great and important lesson for Christians today. The church is made up of people who differ according to their racial, lingual, economic, and cultural backgrounds. The tendency is strong for these differences to exert themselves in the church, influencing it to divide along these lines. The history of Christianity bears witness to the fact that this has happened many times over. Even within a local congregation, where the membership is virtually homogeneous, differences in personality or ambition can lead to the fracturing of the church body. This sort of division in the church is antagonistic to God and ought not to happen. In the chosen text above we see the way to prevent this disaster. The exponents of each faction should come together with open minds and in the spirit of love and lay out their concerns to each other. Then they should put the whole matter before God in prayer, (see Acts 15:28a), and wait for Him to guide them into the right course of action. Finally, each Christian must extend to the other "the right hand of fellowship" and refuse to let the passions of jealousy, envy, and vain competition rule their spirits. This was the course that solved the problem in the early church when it threatened to divide into Jewish and Gentile branches, and it is the course that will establish unity and peace among Christians today, if we will give it the opportunity.

THE ORIGIN OF THE GOSPEL

Gal. 1:11-12 ... "I would have you know ... that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ."

      For the past couple of centuries the Bible has been under attack by people who consider themselves to be "enlightened." The traditional view is that God selected men to inscribe His word with pen and ink and then required them to put down exactly what He wants us to know. These documents were written during the period from perhaps 1500 BC to about 100 AD. They were at first mostly separate, but as the centuries passed, they were gradually assembled into a single body. By about 180 BC the Old Testament scrolls (books to us) had assumed their present unity. We count them as 39 books, but by joining certain ones together the ancient Jews counted them as 22. The New Testament books had been collected and united as a single volume by about 360 AD, and perhaps much earlier. Speaking of the formation of the Old Testament, the apostle Peter wrote, "No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (II Pet. 1:21). The apostle Paul in       II Tim. 3:16 proclaimed  that "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness."

      Beginning some two hundred or more years ago, however, various scholars began to dispute the claims of Peter and Paul that the Bible is inspired of God. They advanced arguments that the Bible is really just another book produced by men, in many cases not even the men whose names are attached to the various books that compose the Bible. For example, rather than being written by the prophet Daniel in the sixth century BC, they claimed it was actually written in the second century BC by nationalistic Maccabbean Jews who incorporated myths or even allegorized factual events. These liberal scholars claim that much material in the Psalms was borrowed from the literature of the Egyptians, Syrians, or Phoenicians.  They declare that in the New Testament, Christians of the two generations following the apostles wrote the books that bear the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and other leaders in the church of the first century. They argue that most of the sayings of Jesus and His miracles were invented to give stature to the man whose name their religion carried. Although they attribute a few epistles to Paul, most say they were written by a later Christian who used his name.

      The Letter to the Galatians, however, is generally conceded by even liberal scholars to be a genuine document written by Paul. And in this very letter that apostle emphasizes that the doctrine he preached was not of human origin. He assures his readers that it came to him only by revelation from God. And in II Tim. 3:16 he firmly states that "all Scripture is inspired by God." If the liberal theologians are correct, then Paul was either misguided, or he was deliberately lying to deceive. If Paul was a man of integrity and intellect, which all evidence serves to indicate, then the liberal theologians are wrong. Paul knew whether he received the gospel by revelation; modern theologians do not. Saul of Tarsus the persecutor would not have become Paul the apostle had not God intervened in his life. The only reason this writer can see why people would discredit Paul, his writings, and the rest of the Bible is to free themselves from the responsibility to submit their lives to the teaching contained therein. As Jesus said in Jno. 3:20, "Everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed."

EXAMINE YOURSELF

 II Cor. 13:5 ... "Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!"

      The word "faith" in New Testament usage can mean either "mental acceptance of something" or "the substance of that which one believes." One has faith in Jesus if he believes Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior of man. The doctrine of who Christ is, of what He did while on earth, and of the truth of what He taught is the faith, which Jude 3 declares was "once for all handed down to the saints." In this sense the faith is synonymous with the gospel. It is with this meaning of "the faith" as "the substance of what we believe," or the gospel, that the text above exhorts us to "test" ourselves to see whether we "are in the faith." The faith which has been handed down to us delineates a specific mode of life to which we are to conform. Once we have committed ourselves to this norm, we must take care lest we drift out of it. Throughout the New Testament we are constantly reminded to guard ourselves lest this drifting tendency take hold of us, for it can happen very easily. The changes that separate us from the way of faith are nearly always small, subtle and seemingly innocuous, so that we hardly take note of them one at a time. It is only after a succession of them that it becomes apparent we have left the way of the faith and entered into the field of sin and transgression. Thus we are warned in Heb. 2:1 that "we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it." The phrase, "what we have heard," is a single word in the original Greek and is here equivalent to "the faith," which is the gospel.

      It is a never ending task for a Christian to determine whether he is conducting his life within the parameters of the faith, which is what Paul was urging upon the Corinthians in the above text. Even a casual reading of the two epistles he wrote to them indicates plainly that they had not been sensitive to influences which had worked strongly within them to lead them further and further from the faith. In fact, they had removed so far that most of us today would hardly admit them to be a church of Christ, and yet, that is how Paul addressed them (I Cor. 1:2; II Cor. 1:1). Nevertheless, the digression had advanced so far that, as the apostle concluded this second letter, he threatened to come and administer corrective measures, (see 13:1-2). He hoped this letter, with the demand to "examine youselves," would have the desired effect of drawing them back within the limits of the faith before his arrival.

      It is better to find your own faults and correct them than carelessly continue with them and have them addressed by someone else. In this writer's long experience as a high school math teacher, he persisted in urging students taking a test to "check your work carefully, find your mistakes and correct them. When I discover with my famous red pen, you'll lose precious credit and get a lower grade." In the Lord's Supper passage in I Corinthians 11, just after writing that "a man must examine himself," Paul then wrote, "If we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged'" (vs. 28, 31). Any sin we are able to detect within us through careful self-examination is a sin we will not carry into the Judgment, where it will surely be uncovered by God, who will condemn us for never having repented of it. Our God, most benevolent, has given us a special mirror for inspecting our lives, His word (Jas. 1:23-25). When used well, it will reveal to us every flaw and blemish in our way of life and show us indeed whether we are "in the faith." After that, it is our task to devote our attention and ability to repent of every sin, to alter the attitudes and behavior patterns that led us into them, and to pray earnestly to God to remove them. If we will be diligent to do that, God will delete them and lead us back into the faith.  But if we ignore or excuse them, He will condemn us in the Judgment and sentence us to everlasting punishment (Mat. 25:46).

      

GRACE THAT IS SUFFICIENT

II Cor. 12:9 ... "And He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.' Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me."

      When Jesus was engaged in His earthly ministry, Paul, then known as Saul of Tarsus, was not one of His disciples. While the Twelve whom Jesus chose to be His apostles accompanied Him wherever He went, beholding His great and often miraculous deeds and hearing from His mouth the heavenly counsel He declared, Saul was sitting at the feet of a Jewish rabbi named Gamaliel being educated in the Mosaic Law and the rabbinical interpretation of it. Some years later, however, Saul was converted to Christ and then appointed to be an apostle of the same status as those who had walked personally with Jesus. In fact, only two verses after the chosen text above, Paul declared, "In no respect was I inferior to the most eminent apostles." But he suffered the great disadvantage of not having been an eyewitness of Jesus' ministry and not hearing the gospel taught from Jesus' very mouth. To overcome this deficiency, the Lord visited Paul with what he called "the surpassing greatness of the revelations" (v.7). In one of these visits Paul was caught up into into heaven where he heard "inexpressible words which a man is not permitted to speak" (v.4). In Gal. 1:12 Paul wrote, "For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ."

      Being a mortal man and subject to the same temptations as anyone else, Paul was faced with the danger of becoming swollen with pride over these frequent revelations and his extraordinary visit to heaven. To restrain this tendency, the Lord sent upon the apostle "a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to torment" him (v.7). In other words, God permitted Satan to afflict Paul with some kind of physical disorder to humble him, somewhat similar to the case in which God allowed Satan to strike Job with a loathsome disease. This disorder cannot be identified, although this writer is of the opinion it related to Paul's eyes and vision. (See Gal. 6:11, 4:14-15; Acts 23:5). Whatever it was, it distressed Paul greatly, so that he implored God three times to remove it. Because it was having the very effect upon Paul that God intended, He refused to remove it. Instead, He gave the answer, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." 

      The Lord refused to take away the physical malady, but He did promise His servant the strength to endure it. There is a great lesson here for Christians today. Pride is ultimately a more destructive force in a person's life than any physical disease, for pride can destroy the soul while a disease can destroy only the body. In Lk. 12:4-5 Jesus taught, "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear the One who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into hell." God hates pride (Pro. 6:17), and Jas. 4:6 declares that "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble." It may just be that when a Christian suffers infirmities, it is part of the Lord's design to purify that person's soul and perfect it for heaven. It is certainly right to make repeated appeals to God to remove one's "thorn in the flesh," for if it is not sent by God, in His great mercy and lovingkindness He may act to remove it. James 5:15 promises that "the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up." But if the infirmity is a thing sent by God, we may trust that He will answer our prayers as He answered Paul's. He will by His grace supply all the strength and patience we need to endure the ailment while it performs its necessary task of perfecting our soul to see God and enjoy His beautiful home forever.