God’s Word for You
Galatians 1:4-5 The gospel
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, May 21, 2024
4 He gave himself for our sins in order to rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father—5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
Having highlighted the divinity of Jesus, Paul quickly reviews what we should already know: Christ’s holy work on our behalf. After all, why leave this unsaid if there is a good opportunity to proclaim it once again? Here is the gospel of our salvation:
“He gave himself for our sins.” This means that Christ volunteered himself. He offered himself. This is his great work as the ultimate and true High Priest (Hebrews 2:17), offering the one sacrifice for sin that atoned for sins: for all sins, for all people, for all time (Hebrews 10:10). He did not pay with money, as Peter says: “not with such things as silver or gold, but with his own precious blood” (1 Peter 1:18-19). He did not lay an angel on an altar to slaughter it, or even all of the angels to preserve his dear and beloved mankind. Angels have no flesh. Angels have no blood to shed. An angel can atone for no one.
Nor did God offer an ordinary man, for no one human being, fallen and without the image of God, could have stood in place for anyone else, or even for himself. But the value of the Son of God is infinite, as infinite as his compassion and his love for us.
The word for “sins” here is hamartiōn (ἁμαρτιῶν), which means sins of “missing the mark,” like an archer trying to hit the center of the target but missing. We can try and try to perfectly hit the mark of God’s will, but we keep on failing. It is now a characteristic of fallen sinful man to miss that mark, and to be completely unable to do what God’s will would have us do. Therefore, on account of his love for us, he came down to rescue us and to become a sin offering to atone for us. This was not on account of anything loveable or useful he saw in us, but in our wretched state of sinfulness, without any worthiness in us at all: “When we were enemies,” Paul says, “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10).
“In order to rescue us from this present evil age.” The present evil age is not this moment in time (for even time is a creation of God’s and is a good thing, Genesis 1:5), but the sinful infection that is in the world at this and all other times, “the corruption in the world caused by evil desires” (2 Peter 1:4). So the clock is not evil, nor the calendar, but the sinful things and beings that inhabit the world alongside us during our lives: That is the present evil age. St. Jerome said: “Just as woodlands get a bad name when they are filled with robbers, and just as we detest a sword by which human blood has been shed and a cup in which poison has been prepared—not because of a fault on the part of the cup and the sword but because of those who have used them in an evil way deserve hatred—so the world, which is a period of time, is not good or evil per se but is called either good or evil according to those who are in it” (LW 27:173). The word “rescue” here is related to the word “select,” showing us that Jesus did not come down to scoop up whatever he could find, like a boy thrusting his hand into a candy jar with his eyes closed. Our Lord came to grasp each one of us, individually, saving us from our own sins and setting faith in our hearts as a gift.
“According to the will of our God and Father.” The will of God is sometimes hidden and secret. He says: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29), and again, “How unsearchable are his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out” (Romans 11:33). But he has revealed many things to mankind, and one of the very first of these was the gospel; his plan to rescue man from our sinfulness through the descendant Eve (Genesis 3:15). He wants all people to be saved (Ezekiel 33:11).
Paul shows the direct connection, an unbreakable connection, between God’s holy will and the atoning work of Christ. It was always the Father’s plan to save mankind through his Son’s holy and innocent sacrifice on the cross. Job goes on about God’s will and man’s obedience to God alone when he says in his closing argument with the three friends, “If I trusted in gold… or if I looked at the radiant sun and moon and offered them a kiss of homage, then these would be sins to be judged, for I would have been unfaithful to God on high” (Job 31:24-28). Such things would have been idolatry.
All of these things might seem to the casual reader to be simple things, the basics of the Gospel message. Where is the controversy, Paul? Are you writing to a Sunday school class? The answer is: No, Paul is deadly serious. He is writing to Christians who were being piped over a cliff to their eternal damnation by a bunch of gospel-twisting Pied-Pipers who hated Christ and who wanted anything but the truth of the Scriptures. Paul brings the very heart of the gospel right here into the greeting of the letter so that there is no mistake: We are saved by faith in Christ alone, which was always the will of the Father.
Anything else is simply not the gospel at all.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.