Galatians 1:2

The churches of Galatia were in a crisis when this letter reached them. Paul had preached the gospel of grace among them and moved on, and afterwards teachers came in, usually called Judaizers and probably Jewish Christians, who insisted that Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep other parts of the law of Moses to be truly saved or fully righteous. That contradicted the gospel Paul had brought, in which a person is justified by faith in Christ apart from the works of the law (Galatians 2:16). To loosen the churches’ hold on that gospel, these teachers challenged the man who preached it. They likely argued that Paul was a lesser apostle than the twelve, or that his message was a human invention made easy for Gentiles. Among Greeks and Romans a message was received according to the standing of its messenger, so discrediting a teacher was a common way to discredit his teaching.

Paul answers in his first line. An ancient letter opened by naming the sender, then the people addressed, and then giving a greeting, and Paul keeps that form while filling each part with the matter of the letter. If his commission is from God, then the gospel he brought is God’s own, closed to negotiation and alteration, and the “different gospel” he is about to name has no claim on the Galatians (Galatians 1:6–9).

Paul writes in company. Adelphós, “brother”, comes from a word meaning “from the same womb”, and the New Testament uses it for fellow believers, men and women together in the family of God. The preposition sýn means “with” or “together with” and speaks of association and companionship. These brethren were most likely Paul’s fellow workers at the time of writing, perhaps Silas, Timothy or others, and Paul leaves them unnamed. Their place in the greeting tells the Galatians that the letter comes with the agreement of the believers around him. Paul’s apostleship rests on Christ alone, and the gospel he defends is the shared faith of the brethren, so that defending it belongs to the whole family.

Ekklēsía is a word for an assembly or congregation, and in the New Testament it means a community of Christians. Paul writes to one such community when he addresses the church of God at Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:2), and he and Timothy write to the saints at Philippi (Philippians 1:1). Here the word is plural.

Paul’s greeting joins two words that between them hold the gospel. Grace, cháris, means graciousness, favour and benefit. In Paul’s mouth it is God’s unmerited favour, his kindness acting toward us in salvation, and the word also covers God’s influence on the heart and the gratitude that answers it. Greek letters commonly opened with a similar-sounding word of greeting, chairein, “rejoice” or “greetings”, and Paul puts grace in its place. Salvation is a gift, as he writes elsewhere: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

Peace, eirḗnē, comes from a verb meaning to join, and it means wholeness, well-being and harmony. It carries into Greek the Hebrew greeting shalom. For a believer it is first of all reconciliation with God, the peace with God that we have through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1), and the quiet of heart that follows. The order of the two words matters, since grace is the means and peace is the result. Paul opens Romans with the same pair (Romans 1:7). In a letter written to churches tempted to earn their standing by the law, the greeting already says where that standing comes from.

Both gifts come “from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ”. The Father is the giver who takes the first step in saving us, and the Son is named beside him as giver too. Kýrios, “Lord”, means one who is supreme in authority, a master, and Paul uses it for Jesus as the exalted Lord. To set Jesus beside the Father as the source of grace and peace is to confess that he is God, and it is through him that these gifts reach us, for he said that he is the way to the Father (John 14:6).

Christ himself embodies both gifts. His grace is that, though he was rich, he became poor for our sakes, so that we through his poverty might be rich (2 Corinthians 8:9), and we are justified freely by that grace (Romans 3:24). He is our peace, who broke down the wall dividing Jew from Gentile and reconciled both to God (Ephesians 2:14–16), making peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20).

One thing is missing after this greeting. In most of his letters Paul goes on to thank God for the people he is writing to. In Galatians he passes straight from the greeting to astonishment that they are deserting the gospel, which shows how grave the matter was.

Verse 4 is the gospel in brief, and the rest of the letter defends it. The verb is the plain word for giving, dídōmi, and its object is the reflexive pronoun heautoû, “himself”. The giver and the gift are the same person. Jesus offered his own life, and he did so willingly. The preposition “for” is hypér, “on behalf of” or “for the sake of”. He gave himself on account of our sins, bearing their penalty in our place.

Isaiah had spoken of this long before, of the servant who was “wounded for our transgressions” and on whom the LORD laid the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:5–6). Jesus spoke of it himself at the Last Supper, when he called the cup the new testament in his blood (Luke 22:20). Paul says it again in other letters: Christ gave himself for us to redeem us (Titus 2:14), and God sent his own Son for sin to do what the law could not do (Romans 8:3–4).

A finished work of this kind leaves no room for human merit. That is why the sentence stands at the head of a letter against adding circumcision and law-keeping to faith, and why Paul will go on to show that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law (Galatians 3:10–14).

Having stated the gospel, Paul breaks into praise. A sentence of this kind is called a doxology, and “whom” looks back to “God and our Father” at the end of verse 4. Glory, dóxa, comes from the root of a verb for what is apparent, and it takes in dignity, honour, praise and worship. To give God glory is to acknowledge his majesty and worth, here shown above all in the grace and power by which he saved us.

“For ever and ever” is literally “unto the ages of the ages”. It uses aiṓn again, the word behind “world” in verse 4, now in the plural and doubled to speak of time that has no end. The present evil age will pass, and the glory of God runs on through all the ages. Amḗn is a Hebrew word carried into Greek. Its root sense is “firm” or “trustworthy”, and at the close of a prayer or blessing it is the speaker’s strong assent, “so be it”. Those who heard the letter read aloud in the churches could add their own.

Paul ends other passages in the same way: “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen” (Romans 11:36), and likewise in Philippians 4:20 and 1 Timothy 1:17. Since salvation is wholly God’s doing, all the praise for it belongs to him, the truth later summed up in the words soli Deo gloria, glory to God alone. The same conviction runs through the rest of Galatians, where Abraham is counted righteous by believing God (Galatians 3:6–9) and believers are told to “stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1).

The glory given here to the Father is shared by the Son and shown through him. Christ is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1). The Father is glorified when every knee bows to Jesus and every tongue confesses “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11), and heaven’s song is that the Lamb is “worthy to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing” (Revelation 5:12).

These five verses give us firm ground. The gospel we have received came from God, through an apostle whom the risen Christ himself sent, so we can trust it as God’s own word and weigh every other message against it. A teaching that adds human requirements to what Christ has done is measured by this greeting and found to be a different gospel.

The greeting also tells us where we stand with God. Grace and peace come to us from the Father and the Son as gifts, and our standing before God rests on what Christ gave when he gave himself. That frees us from trying to earn his favour and lets us serve him out of love. We have been taken out of the present evil age by a rescue the Father planned, which means that its values and its powers no longer own us.

Paul’s response to all this is to give God the glory, and his “Amen” is one that every believer can say with him.