God’s Word for You
Galatians 5:10-12 Those agitators
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, August 5, 2024
10 I am confident, since everything is in the Lord’s hands, that you will take no other view. The one who is throwing you into confusion will pay the penalty, whoever he may be. 11 But as for me, brothers, if I am still preaching circumcision, why do I still suffer persecution? In that case the stumbling block of the cross has been removed. 12 As for those agitators, I wish they would be completely cut off from you!
Paul says more literally, “I am confident in the Lord,” which means that all his confidence is in the Lord’s hands: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man” (Psalm 118:8). Grammatically, we would say that all of Paul’s trust is in the Lord, and only in the Lord, and he is confident that the Lord will continue to hold onto his Galatians friends. He is also confident that, having reviewed with them the danger that they are in and how they have been duped by someone preaching a false gospel to them, that they will come around and renew their faith as it was in the beginning.
Paul hints that there was one Gospel-twisting Judaizer in particular. He won’t even use his name, but Paul is confident that he, whoever he is, will pay the penalty for his false teaching. Such men “bring swift destruction on themselves” (2 Peter 2:1). For “God knows how to rescue godly men from trials and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment and their punishment” (2 Peter 2:9).
This man, and his ring of followers, had been stirring up and confusing the good Christians in their churches. We don’t need to imagine their arguments and teaching, because so many false teachers are still around who say the same or similar things. The first word out of their mouths is usually “love.” “Jesus teaches us to love one another!” they say, as if one verse erases everything else that Jesus ever said, or that the Holy Spirit has caused to be recorded in the Bible. “Why are you so stubborn about such little things?” they wonder. “How can you be so unloving? Let us have our say about the way to heaven; don’t insist that your Scriptures are always right, or that only those books teach the true way. What about our traditions? What about our opinions?” With words like these they attack the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, and baptism, and the proper use of law and gospel, and whether or not a minister has any authority to forgive sins. And if anybody gives in one little bit on such “trifles” (although none of these things are trifles) they will go on to attack the ministry itself and its qualifications, and a dozen indifferent things that they will insist on. But the dozen things become a hundred and a thousand soon enough. Their cry to be “heard” only means that they want us to be silenced, and that everybody has to believe and worship in their way, or else they are accused of being “unloving,” because that’s the only word in their canon.
In Galatia, they were offended by the idea of the cross itself. It couldn’t be the horrible suffering and death of a criminal, even if he was a prophet, that benefits us!
My professor and college advisor wrote: “The corrupt and the counterfeit push aside the whole concept of cross bearing in favor of joy without it. Fake Christianity offers the Chrsitian an imitation of Christ’s glory in heaven, not of his humiliation on earth. The phony and artificial church turns worship into a spiritual happy hour devoid of repentance, with cheap absolution, with no thought of taking God seriously in either law or gospel. And people love it. They still get to be their own god, their own bible, their own source of ultimate truth and salvation” (Deutschlander, The Theology of the Cross p. vii). Paul recognizes that if the “offense” (stumbling block) that people have over the cross were removed, then he wouldn’t be persecuted.
Paul returns to the problem of circumcision. He wishes that the agitators would be cut off from his flock. Here he uses the plural and not the singular, so he isn’t only talking about the ringleader, but about all his followers who keep harping about circumcision. Paul is upset and he is boiling mad about what this is doing to people’s souls, and he allows some sarcasm to enter in. “To be cut off” is the verb’s basic meaning, but it could also be used in another way, considering the idea of circumcision: “I wish that they would just go all the way and have themselves castrated!”
Luther asks whether it is proper for an apostle to curse these agitators in this way. Can a Christian curse someone? We are encouraged to avoid cursing under the Second Commandment, recognizing that God would not have us use his name “to curse, swear, lie, or deceive, or use witchcraft.” But Paul himself called down a curse about false preaching when he said, “But even if we or an angel from heaven would preach any gospel alongside the one we preached to you—we must curse him!” (Galatians 1:8). But when the word of God is despised and cursed (and therefore God himself is cursed), then we must say, “Blessed be the word of God, and cursed be anything apart from the word and from God, whether it is an apostle or an angel from heaven!” (Luther, LW 27:45).
There is no doctrine of the Holy Scriptures that is so small that we should give in and say, “It is of no importance,” or else God would not give special blessings or glory to those who have been slain because of the word of God (Revelation 6:9). “Anyone,” John says, “who goes on ahead and does not remain in the teaching of God does not have God. Do not receive him into your house. Do not even wish him well” (2 John 1:9,10). But on the other side of that, pray for your pastor, that he will be faithful, that he will keep studying the word of God, improving his teaching and preaching, that he will “be deaf when anyone speaks apart from Jesus Christ,” and that God will send his holy angels to guard him against the attacks of the devil and his wicked followers. “For he will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways” (Psalm 91:11). And the path of such men, as with you, is with the angels, who follow Christ.
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.