NOTES for Gal 1:6

Once again, Paul reminds us who matters most and who comes first. How often we really do seek people's favor and do things so that they will speak well of us. But Paul speaks plainly and sternly: “If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” We keep trying to combine the incompatible: to please both God and people, to follow our heart while still being liked by everyone around us. We fear human condemnation. We look over our shoulders: what will they say? What will they think? Paul does not look back. He has chosen his path and knows that he is following the path God appointed for him. Everything else is unimportant. Whatever anyone may say, we will be servants of Christ only if we give up the idea of pleasing each and every person.

Paul begins his letter to the Christians of Galatia with a reproach that they, as we can see, easily and quickly abandoned what Paul had witnessed to them (vv. 6-7). And in his reproaches the apostle is extremely severe, excluding every possibility for a Christian to remain a Christian if he accepts the distorted gospel brought to the Galatians by certain preachers not named in the letter (vv. 8-10). At first glance, Paul's attitude toward a "different gospel" may appear overly harsh. Indeed, why not allow different points of view in the church on foundational matters?

But Paul, as we can see, looks at the matter differently, and not because he is worried about a lack of formal unanimity in the Galatian church. For him Christianity is not a search for truth, but truth itself; not a question, but the answer. In the search for truth, one can put forward various suppositions and different possible answers to foundational questions. But once it has been found, there is nothing more to search for and nothing more to suppose, because the true answer is always unambiguous and never hypothetical.

Of course, in our world, which is not yet fully transformed, and by means of our mind, which is not yet fully transformed, we are unable to see the truth in all its fullness, because both Christ and the Kingdom can be seen only with spiritual sight. But Paul speaks and acts as an inhabitant of the Kingdom and a witness of Christ. He bears witness to the One who is the answer, not to his own spiritual and intellectual searches. The point is not that the capacity for spiritual or intellectual search is bad in itself. The point is that it is out of place to ask questions when the living answer stands before you. Such a position can testify only to the insincerity of the search, or to delusion, to an unreadiness to see the truth that is revealed in such a way that, if the seeker received this revelation rightly, he would no longer have to search for anything. And the apostle does not want his Galatian brothers, having departed from Christ and the Kingdom that had opened to them as genuine reality, to find themselves again in the position of seekers, as if nothing had ever been revealed to them. Such a rollback would be a real spiritual catastrophe. It would mean the loss of the Kingdom, with completely unclear prospects for returning there later. Paul, of course, could not allow this, because the building up of the Kingdom was the meaning of the apostle's life and ministry.