Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Who are the Galatians? In short, they are a group of people from the Gentile region Paul and Barnabas visited on their first missionary journey.

We read about this in acts 13 through 14. As we know, what's been going on with this influx of Gentile believers

is that some of the Jewish believers have been trying to force their culture on them,

the laws of circumcision and whatnot.

Paul has already addressed this at least twice and

they attempted to resolve things at the Jerusalem Council, but some of the Jews

didn't get the memo. Either that or they're intentionally rebelling against the

spirit-led decision from the Jerusalem Council.

They've started going around to all the places Paul preaches and undermining his teaching by telling

the people they have to convert to Judaism first.

The general term for people who do this is Judaism. People who combine God's

grace with human effort. We'll link to an article with more info on the

Judaism in the show notes. This general idea is still alive and well in religion today, but it's not usually called by that name.

We usually refer to it as legalism or moralism.

Paul is furious with these undermines, and at some points he even seems to be furious with the church for believing

them.

But he opens his letter with grace and peace to the Galatian churches before making a quick segue into his rebuke.

By the way, Paul's intros are not fluff. They're dense with theology. Try not to rush over them.

Paul points out that this distortion of the gospel that they're believing is a false

gospel and he pronounces God's judgment on anyone who preaches it.

Then Paul launches into his own story to give him some credibility for making this argument.

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