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

Who are the Galatians? In short, there 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 Judaizers. People who combine God's

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

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.

He was a zealous Jew, eager to live out the traditions of his fathers, even to the point of

violently persecuting those who disagreed. But he said God chose him before he was born, and at the right time, God graciously

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