This letter to the Galatians by Paul, the master teacher of scripture, is a classic lesson on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. It was written to counter the false teaching of those Jews who posed as Christians but had the ulterior motive of wanting to distract the Galatian believers into keeping the redundant Jewish laws, including the need to be circumcised, in order for them to be truly right with God.



Like the epistle to the Romans, the teaching regarding justification by faith that is contained in this epistle has played a strategic role in the history of the Christian church, with both Martin Luther and John Wesley recording the profound impact this epistle made on their personal and professional lives.

The inhabitants of Gallo-gærci, contracted into Galati were Gauls in origin and the infirmity of the Gallic race was that they were fickle in their resolve and fond of change ― not to be trusted. Another description was that they were: frank, impetuous, impressionable, eminently intelligent whilst being extremely changeable, inconsistent, fond of show, perpetually quarreling, the fruit of excessive vanity. This is shown by the manner of Paul’s arguments and explanations.

In the first two chapters Paul defends his status as an apostle with a record of his change of heart from one who persecuted the church to one who was appointed by God himself to preach and teach the word. He took pains to explain how he avoided the then leadership of the church, explaining that it was not until three years after his change of heart that he made contact with Peter and the Lord’s brother James just to ensure they were preaching the same message.

The purpose in writing the letter was to counteract the insidious teaching of a heretical group of Jews who were determined to undermine his teaching amongst the Gallic people and discredit him by intimating that he observed the law amongst the Jews whilst persuading the Gentiles to renounce it.

Their counterfeit gospel directly countered the essence of the gospel Paul preached by combining salvation through Christ with the observance of sections of the Judaic Mosaic law.

With great passion Paul exposes the errors of this bewitching perversion of the gospel by leading the Galatians back to justification by faith alone, which was the only route to genuine freedom in the Spirit.

One critical inclusion of the counterfeit gospel was that of circumcision. To accept circumcision, which he had received as a child but had discounted as being of no value to him, was to choose salvation by the works of the law which was to effectively deny the validity of the cross on which Christ died, which was crucial to their salvation.

He ends his letter with the statement From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus giving a clear and unambiguous declaration that no matter what others say he has been persecuted because of his break with Judaism in order to fully align himself with the Lord Jesus Christ and His all sufficient sacrifice to redeem mankind from sin and the world.

This is an epistle with great depth of teaching that is crucial to believers today.

Meet the Author

In hindsight Peter realised God had chosen him from birth and personally trained and directed him throughout his life. A Jew asked him to write on Genesis, and his rabbinic brother to write on Moses’ Tent of the Meeting.

Peter writes purely by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and has the gift of leading people into a deeper spiritual understanding of the word and a closer union with God. He led the rabbi to a personal meeting with his Messiah through his writing. See A Tale of Three Men.



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