Intro., Doc of Apostleship; Gal. 1:1
Galatians 1:1 NASB
“Paul, an apostle (not {sent} from men nor through the
agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from
the dead).”
Galatians is one of the most
important and vital books in the New Testament. It deals with several vital
things that are crucial to understand today such as what is the true nature of
the gospel? What does a person do or believe in order to be saved? Today we
live in a time where there is much confusion about the gospel, much of which
comes under the general title of Lordship salvation. basically
what this means is that if you are truly going to be saved then you have to
believe that Jesus Christ is Lord of your life. If He is not Lord of everything
in your life He is not Lord at all. Lordship salvation takes faith to mean
commitment; it says that the assurance of our salvation is grounded in the
evidence of our salvation. So if we look at a person’s life to examine, making
every believer a fruit inspector, then if there is no evidence of salvation
there is no salvation. They also make a distinction between the kind of faith
that saves and every day faith. They take faith to mean commitment. So we are
going to be addressing these issues: what is salvation, what is justification?
Paul, emphasising his
apostolic authority, addresses a letter to the Galatian
churches reminding them of Christ’s death on the cross for them. That is what
is taking place in the first paragraph. We know from the salutation that it
comes from Paul. What do we know about the apostle Paul? First of all, he was
not born Paul, he was Saul, born in the city of Tarsus. Paul obviously had a rich academic training as a
young man. We know from analysing his writings, his ability to present an
argument, the logical structures of his arguments, the words that he uses, the
metaphors that he uses, the idioms that he uses, that this is a man of
incredible intellect. But it is not his natural intellect that gives him such
insight into spiritual things. As we know, in the spiritual life our human IQ
is not the issue in learning and assimilating the Word of God and spiritual
truth. God in His grace provides for and makes that possible for every single
believer. So it doesn’t matter what our academic background is, what our native
intelligence is, what our IQ is; the issue is whether or not we are a member of
the royal family of God because at the instant of salvation God the Holy Spirit
indwells us and we are given a human spirit, and it is by means of that human
spirit that the Holy Spirit enables us to understand any doctrine in the Word
of God. All that we need to do is turn up at Bible class and concentrate a
little and God the Holy Spirit will do the rest. That doesn’t mean that we will
understand exhaustively because none of us can comprehend eternity
exhaustively, or the Trinity exhaustively, and many things like that which are
beyond our finite minds, but we can understand it truly to a certain degree.
The apostle Paul explained
things and deep doctrines in such a way that even the apostle Peter said that
there are many deep things from Paul that are difficult for us to understand.
Paul was born a Jew from the tribe of Benjamin. He was sent to Jerusalem when he was about 13 or 14 to train under one of the
most remarkable rabbis of all history, Gamaliel. Paul
said that personal merit had nothing to do with his salvation and he learned
that one day when he was on the road to Damascus while he was persecuting believers in the early
church. On the way the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him. At that
point he recognised that Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, he was faced
with the reality of the resurrected Lord, and it was then that the Lord gave
him the gift of apostleship, commissioning him to be the apostle to the
Gentiles. That is the basis underlying this first verse that we come to.
The word “apostle” is a
predicate adjective that describes Paul. He is an apostle. What is an apostle?
The doctrine of apostleship
- The Greek word is apostolos
[a)postoloj] which has a rich heritage in the Greek. We need
to note that in this particular passage it is used without the article. In
Greek if it does not have the definite article it can be for emphasis of
quality, it can still be definite, or it can be indefinite. The definite
article in Greek functions quite differently from the definite article in
English. Here we have the use of the indefinite article because Paul is
one apostle among many. He sais he is an apostle. But the in anarthrous emphasis
of this Paul would also emphasise the highest quality of the noun, the
high quality of apostleship. He is an apostle of Jesus Christ. Apostleship
was the highest rank in the membership of the royal family of God in the
church age.
- The word apostolos
is a Greek word that was used originally in classical Greek for a high
ranking admiral or general officer who was chosen to command either a
naval fleet or an army. The root meaning of the word apostolos is the one who is sent,
and then it takes on a technical meaning for the one who is commissioned
with a task. The individual was commissioned to perform a task and given
the authority and responsibility to carry out that task. That means that
the word inherently connotes command and leadership responsibilities. It
was also used to refer to a group of Greek colonies and then it developed
over time to just refer to the leader of that group. It came to mean
someone with authority, someone with leadership; it had both a military
background and a colonial background. When we come to the New Testament we
discover that this word is used to refer to a temporary spiritual gift.
- The gift of apostleship by way of definition in
the New Testament had two categories. The first is the technical sense—a spiritual
gift. As a spiritual gift we know that it was given by the Holy Spirit at
the moment of salvation. It is determined by the sovereign plan of God the
Father. As we see here in the first verse of Galatians every member of the
Trinity is involved in the process of determining the spiritual gift[s] of
each believer. Spiritual gifts are give a) at salvation; b) they are
determined by the sovereignty of God and distributed by the Holy Spirit;
c) they are irrevocable; d) spiritual gifts are in some cases developed
(e.g. pastor-teacher)—there needs to be time for training, there needs to
be growth to a certain level of spiritual maturity, there needs to have
been time to study the Word of God.
- An apostle is one who was commissioned by Christ
Himself to the task of establishing the church in the church age. That is
the technical use. Then there is the general use of the word that
describes men who are commissioned by either a local church or by one of
the apostles themselves as a missionary. The Bible uses the word apostle
to refer to men like Barnabas, James the brother of the Lord, and two or
three others. They do not have the spiritual gift of apostle, they do not
meet the other qualifications of an apostle, and therefore they are not an
apostle in the technical sense. There were only twelve apostles in that
technical sense, the eleven plus Paul.
- When we look at the spiritual gift of apostle: a)
it was the first and highest of all spiritual gifts ever given. This gift
is listed first in terms of its priority in both 1 Corinthians 12:28 and Ephesians 4:11; b) the apostles had plenary
[full] powers; c) the spiritual gift of apostleship carried the highest
authority God has ever delegated in the church age. The apostle had
authority over all the local churches, and in contrast the pastor has
authority over only the one local church; d) the purpose for the spiritual
gift of apostleship was twofold. First of all, the communication of the
Word of God and the formation of the New Testament canon. All of the New
Testament books were either written by an apostle or they were written
under the authority of an apostle. Luke was not an apostle but he was the
travelling companion of the apostle Paul and wrote under his authority.
James wrote under the authority of John and Peter in Jerusalem; e) the gift of apostleship was given in the pre-canon
period of the church age. While there was no written New Testament there
needed to be leadership by those men who understood the doctrines related
to the church age; f) it was also the responsibility of the apostles to
train pastors, establish local churches, and to establish local church policy;
g) apostles were not appointed until after the resurrection of Christ—there
was a group of apostles mentioned in Matthew 10 but this is a different
category who were sent to Israel. This was a temporary commissioning by
the Lord Jesus Christ to witness to Israel and not what we are talking about with reference
to the New Testament, church age spiritual gift
of apostleship; h) the spiritual gift of apostleship was temporary and
discontinued after the completion of the canon of Scripture. We know this
because of the qualifications to be an apostle. An apostle needed to be a
witness to the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ and he had to be
commissioned as an apostle by the resurrected Lord. (Paul was in Jerusalem
and would have been about 16 or 17 years of age when Jesus began His
public ministry. It stands to reason that Paul was probably among the
Pharisees who were antagonistic to Jesus in the Gospels)
- Who were those who had the gift of apostleship?
Remember that there is a distinction between the two different categories of
apostle. Who are the eleven men plus the apostle Paul? We find the list in
Matthew 10:2-4—Simon Peter, his brother Andrew; the two sons of Zebedee—James who was murdered very early under Herod
Agrippa and the apostle John who wrote the Gospel; Philip who was an
evangelist and very concerned with evangelism; he used that gift in two
places in Acts. Bartholomew who was also called Nathanael,
Thomas, Matthew (Levi), Simon the Canaanite, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus who
was also called Jude. Twelfth would be the apostle Paul.
- In Acts chapter one Peter gets the great idea
that there needs to be twelve disciples. So they are having a meeting
where they have been in prayer as they wait in Jerusalem as the Lord instructed them for the coming of
the Holy Spirit. Peter makes the suggestion that they choose from among them
someone to take the place of Judas. They cast lots and chose Matthias to be
the twelfth disciple. The problem with this is that man does not choose
people to have a spiritual gift. Men do not determine who has any
spiritual gift. Spiritual gifts are determined under the sovereignty of
God the Father and distributed by God the Holy Spirit. Man cannot elect
what is sovereignly distributed by God. Paul makes this point in Galatians
1:1 because his authority had been questioned by the Judaisers.
He uses the phrase “not from men.” The phrase in the Greek is apo plus the genitive plural of anthropos [a)po a)nqrwpoj], the generic term for humanity, mankind. apo plus the genitive emphasises source or origin. So
the first thing Paul is saying here is that he is an apostle but not from
the source of men, mankind. Secondly he says, “nor through the agency of
man,” dia plus the genitive singular anthropou [dia a)nqrwpou], which emphasises agency. The gift of
apostleship is not passed on from man to man; it does not come from
apostolic procession. Apostleship comes through the agency of Jesus Christ—dia [dia] plus the genitive singular—and God the Father. Paul
then says, “who raised Him from the dead.” This
is an aorist participle, egeiro
[e)geirw], meaning to raise up. God the Father is the one
who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. This is a subtle reminder that Paul
has seen the resurrection of Christ. When Paul went on his first missionary
journey he went to the area of what is now south central Turkey, the area that is known as Galatia. The people were very familiar with his
testimony and how he had seen the resurrected Lord on the road to Damascus.