I want to do a study on the book of Galatians, and I plan on going through the whole book verse by verse, and chapter by chapter.  We may not read every single verse.  I do plan on reding a lot of it, going through it in order, and hitting all of the main points from each chapter. 

However,  first I want to do a preliminary study.  There is a lot in the book of Galations that I think we can get a better and deeper understanding of, if we back up and look at otherpassages, because the Bible fits together as whole.  I also want to take a look at passages from the book of Genesis, the Gospels, the epistles, the book of Acts, and possibly even some of Peter's writings.  Anyway,  the first part of my study, before we get too far into the book of Galatians, will be a deep study on what the Gospel is, why we need redemtion.  Once  we start reading from the book of Galatians, it will makes sense why this is a topic a we are going to study first, before we read past the first chapter of Galatians.    

So let's start out in Galatians chapter one, and get some context, and then we will back up and read from other Bible passages.   Galatians chapter one starts out by telling us that Paul's appostleship was appointed directly by Jesus, and God the Father.   Paul tells us that he wasn't appointed by men.  He was getting his instructions directly from God.  

Paul was writing this letter to the people in the region of Galatia, which would be modern day Turkey.  In verse 3 and 4, he speaks a blessing of grace and peace to these people.  Quoting it from the New Living Translation: Paul says,  "May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.  (4) Jesus gave his life for our sins, just as God our Father planned, in order to rescue us from this evil word in which we live."  (NLT) 

So he starts out all kind and sweet, telling us that Jesus gave His life, in order to rescue us, but then in verse 6 and 7, he changes his tone a bit.  He says, 

6-7 (NLT):

“I am shocked that you are turning away so soon from God, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of Christ.  You are following a different way that pretends to be the Good News (7) but is not the Good News at all.  You are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ.” 

Paul was shocked that these people that once understood the true Gospel, were now listening to people that were twisting it.  

Then he tells us in verse 8-9 that anyone that preaches any other Gospel besides the Good News that he has preached, even if it is an angel, let them be cursed.  So Paul took the Gospel message very seriously.  He said in verse 10 that his goal isn't to try to win the approval of any human, but his intent is to be pleasing to God.  Otherwise he wouldn't be Christ's servant.  

In verse 11-12 (N LT) Paul says:

Dear brothers and sisters, I want you to understand that the gospel message I preach is not based on human reasoning. (12) I received my message from no human source, and no one taught me.  Instead I received it by direct revelation of Jesus Christ.” 

So Paul is saying that the Gospel was revealed to him directly from Jesus.  

This is confirmed in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4a (NLT):

Where it says, “I was caught up to the third heaven fourteen years ago.  Whether I was in my body or out of my body, I don’t know—only God knows.  (3) Yes, only God knows whether I was in my body or outside my body.  But I know (4) that I was caught up to paradise and heard things…

First I want to explain what the thrid heaven is, for anyone that might find this to be confusing.  Our earth's atmoshere is called heaven. Ephesians 6:12, references spiritual warfare in the heavenly realms, or "heavently places," depending on which translation you read.   Anyway, my understanding is that the earth's atmoshpere is the first heaven, outer space or the universe is the second heaven, and then where God resides and sits on His throne is the third heaven. 

So in 2 Corinthians 12:2 where is says, Paul was caught up into the third heaven, I believe it's telling us that Paul was caught up into the place where God resides, and it tells us he ws given revelations directly from Jesus, and this is the Gospel message that Paul was preaching.  Paul took this message so seriuosly that he says, anyone that preaches it differntly should be cursed.  But what exactly is the true Gospel message that Paul heard from Jesus, and why was it so important?

That's what we are going to take a look at and study.  

 Of course most Christians know the passage from John 3:16-18 (NKJV) which is the Gospel in a nutshell “6 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." 18 “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

Paul preached this Gospel everywhere he went, and there are passages that give us an even deeper understanding of what exactly this means.  I want start in the book of Acts where we can actually read a full sermon that Paul preached in the synagouge in Antioch.

The full sermon can be found in  Acts chapter 13:14-39.  I won't read that entire passage, but let's take a look at some highlights from that sermon:

The setting was that Paul and Barnabas were in the synogogue on the Sabbeth Day, and after the usual readings from the book of Moses and the Prophets, the leaders of the service invited Paul to get up and give any words of encouragent that they might have.  So Paul got up and addressed the congregation as, "Men of Israel, and you God fearing Gentiles."  He started his sermon by telling the crowd some history of Salvation message, and talked about God choosing the Israelite nation, and led the them out of the bondage of slavery in Egypt, and brought them into the Promised Land.

Paul explained that it was from David's lineage that God brought Isreal a Savior.  The full lineage isn't explained here, but for anyone that doesn't know, David was a descendant of Abraham, who is considered the father of our faith.  Quoting from the NLT, Genesis 15:6 says, "Abram believed the LORD, and the LORD counted him as righteous because of his faith."  Abraham was the Father of the Isrealite nation.  He had a son named Isaac, and Isaac had a son named Jacob. Jacob's name was later changed to Israel.  Jacob/Isreal had 12 sons, and those son's were called the twelve tribes of Isreal.  David descended from Isreal's son Judah.  So Jesus came to us from the Isrealite nation from the tribe of Judah, and was a descendant of David.   

Anyway, getting back to Paul's sermon in Acts chapter 13, in verse 26 Paul again addresses the crowd as ,  “Brothers, sons of Abraham, and to those that among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of salvation. 

So here Paul is making a distinction that salvation message was for the desendants of Abraham, or the Isrealites, but it was also for anyone else that reverenced God.  

Paul then talks about the rulers in Jerusalem putting Jesus to death on the cross, and then God raising him from the dead and appearing to the men in Galilee.  In verse32-33 it says “And now we are here to bring you this Good News.  The promise was made to our ancestors, (33) and God has now fulfilled it for US, their descendants, by raising Jesus.  This is what the second Psalm says about Jesus: ‘You are my Son, Today I have become your Father.’ “

Then jump down to verse 38-39 “Brothers listen! We are here to proclaim that through this man Jesus there is forgiveness for your sins. (39) Everyone who believes in him is declared right with God—something the law of Moses could never do.” 

I want to look at verse the part of verse 38, and then verse 39 in the King James Version:

“…through this man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins: (39) And by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could never be justified by the law of Moses.” 

So to summarize what we just read, Paul was telling us in Acts 13: verse 16 and 26 that the salvation message was for Israel or (the sons of Abraham,) as well as for the God fearing Gentiles. So, in other words, the message he was preaching was for EVERYONE.   Paul explains that their purpose was to bring them the Good News, that through Jesus everyone can be forgiven of their sins and made right with God, IF they believe in Jesus.  He also clarifies in verse 39 that the Law of Moses could never justify anyone or make them right with God. 

So that was a full sermon we could read that Paul preached, and then if we go to book of Romans, the Gospel message is woven all throughout that book, and Paul goes a bit more indepth about Mosaic the Law not justifying us, and that is through our faith in Jesus that we are made right with God.

Starting in in Romans chapter 1 (verse 1) Paul again tells us he was chosen By God to preach the Gospel.  In the NLT verse 1-4 says, "This letter is from Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, chosen by God to an apostle and sent out to preach his Good News. (2) God promised this Good News long ago through his prophets in the holy Scriptures. (3) The Good News is about his Son [Jesus].  In his earlthly life, he was born into King David's family line.  (4) And he was shown to be the Son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. He is Jesus Christ our Lord. 

In Romans 1:16 Paul says he is not ashamed of the Gospel, or the Good News about Christ.  He said the Gospel is the power of God to save everyone that believes. 

In other words the Gospel is God's power to deliver us.  But what do we need delivarnce from?   We can find our answser clear back in the book of Genesis.  Chapter one tells the story about God creating the entire earth.  God would create something, and then he would always say, "And it was good."  You can find that phrase repeated several times in Genesis chapter 1, and then verse 31 it says, 
"Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good."  

So all of God's creation was good.  The Garden of Eden was a perfect paradise.  There was no sin, sickness, natural disasters,hatred, poverty, death, or corruption of any kind.  Everything God made was good.   

But God created mankind with a free will.   And free will can't be exercised unless there is a choice to do the wrong thing.  So in Genesis 2:15-17 it tells us, "15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat[d] of it you shall surely die.”

So Adam and Eve were free to eat of any tree in the garden that they wanted to, they were only given one rule, don't eat the fruit from one specific tree, the tree of of the knowledge of good and evil, and if they did, the consquence would be death.  

Then in Geneis chapter 3, we read that Satan (in the form of a serpent) tempted Eve, and she ate the fruit from the forbidden tree, and also gave some to her husband to eat.  This was the first sin that was ever committed.  If you stop and really analyze this, God had given Adam and Eve everything they needed to live a perfect life.  (to be continued)

 sin entered the earth, and all of curses and the corruption that came with it.   

In Genesis 3:14-19 we can read about some of the curses.  For example, the serpent or snake would now have to crawl on it's belly, women would experience pain in child birth, the ground was cursed it would now produce thorns and thistles, and man would have to toil and sweat to produce food.  

Let's just read verses 22-24 from the NIV, it says,  " the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

So Adam and Eve were also kicked out of the garden, but if we read it carefully, this part was not a punishment, but rather out of God's mercy.  It says that God didn't want them eating from the tree of life, so they would live forever.  If you think about that, would we want to live on the earth forever, now that corruption and curses entered the earth, and it was no longer a perfect paradise?  God didn't want that for us.  Instead, God had a better plan.  

If we back up to verse 15, it tells us God's plan for redemption.  Genesis 3:15 God said, "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel.”   In this verse the phrase, "her Seed" is capitalized in most translations, and "Her Seed" here is referring to Jesus.  Jesus would was the Seed that would come and crush Satan's head.  The Gospel message was prophesied about even clear back in the book of Genesis.  But the point I'm making here, is that the Gospel is God's power to redeem us from all the corruption that sin brought with it.  

We know for sure the physical death was a result of Adam's sin.  

God had told Adam that if he ate of the tree, then he would die.  I've heard a lot of people preach on this verse, and I tried to look it up in Hebrew to get a deeper meaning of what the phrase, "You shall surely die" means.   I've heard people say the literal translation is actually, "you shall surely die, die."  I   personally couldn't find any evidence of that.  I went to Biblehub.com, and searched out information, and I didn't see that.  But I do think that the idea of a double death makes a lot of sense.  Because I believe the day that Adam and Eve ate the fruit, that they died spiritually, but it also set in motion the process of aging and death in our earthly bodies, even though they didn't die physically that day.   

When I say, "spirital death," I mean that our spirits were no longer one with God, after Adam and Eve sinned, and they became separated from Him.   While I can't see any proof that Adam and Eve were spiritually one with God, it does tell us that we were dead in our sins, but once we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we become one with Him.   

But God had a plan for redemption even back then.  

In Genesis 3:15 God said, "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel.”  This of course is worded differently, depending on which translation you are reading.  Some translations say,   In this verse, God was talking to the serpent In this verse the phrase, "her Seed" is capitalized in most translations, and "Her Seed" here is referring to Jesus.  Jesus would was the Seed that would come and crush Satan's head.  The Gospel message was prophesied about even clear back in the book of Genesis.  But the point I'm making here, is that the Gospel is God's power to redeem us from all the corruption that sin brought with it.  

"8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast."  I think Romans 1:16-17 and Ephesians 2:8-9 are basically saying the same thing.  That God extended His grace to us, by sending us a Savior, and this message carries power if it mixed wtih our faith.  God's part was grace, but our part is faith, and when you mix Grace and faith together. the Gospel message carries power to save anyone that believes it.   

 In Romans 3:9 the New Living Tranlations titles this passage, "All people are sinners," while the ESV titles it "No one is righteous.  But the point is that in this chapter Paul gives a clear understanding that our works/our behavior/ our righteous deeds, will never be good enough to meet God's Holy Standards.  

Romans 3:19-31, Romans 5:5, & Romans 13:8-10 (All verses from the NLT)