THE GOSPEL IS FROM HEAVEN

‘But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.’ Galatians 1:11-12

At first glance this phrase, ‘not according to man’, may simply be Paul’s way of saying that he was not taught the gospel message by the apostles in Jerusalem. Rather, he received the message by a ‘revelation’ from Jesus Christ, that is, it was given to him directly by the Savior. Some might think this to be an arrogant boast as if he said, ‘I don’t need any human validation for my message, I get it directly from heaven so you have to believe what I say.’ No, Paul is saying something far deeper here. Throughout the bible there is an important distinction between things that originate on earth and things that originate in heaven. Earthy things are concepts native to this world, things we eat and breathe, things known apart from divine revelation, things both good and bad… and very human. Into this earthy world we are all born. Everything we experience from the moment we bounce on our daddy’s knee comes from the earth; even religious or moral things are earthbound. Religion, for example, is a natural phenomenon that attempts to describe God apart from God’s revelation. All cultures have a religion because religion arises from the natural quest of man. Morality is quite the same. All peoples have a knowledge of good and bad even if they disagree on the particulars. Because man is created in God’s image, humanity will always express that image in religion and morals. As we learned from Paul’s trip to Athens, man’s religion and its morality, even that which comes out of the most advanced culture in that day, falls miserably short of anything that is holy, just and good. So we love religion and morals because they are natural to us. This is what we know.

So why is this important? Because one of the great temptations of man is to move from heavenly religion back to an earthly one, to move from grace unto morals. Notice, if you will, that Paul ripped the Galatians not because they were an immoral people (they were very moral), but because they abandoned the heavenly message that saves and replaced it with an earthly one.

Paul had preached in Galatia and had given them this heavenly message over and over again; the message that was ‘not according to man.’ But shortly after his departure the churches there began to think that the old Jewish religion and morality was an easier, more measurable and more sensible option to follow. After all, the gospel that Paul preached was something very new to them - even scary - a message that gave men the freedom to live under grace rather than law. The religion of Moses, on the other hand, was easy to grasp and had clear boundaries. Men always prefer defined goals to freedom. Paul spent weeks and weeks teaching them this new way of living under the eye of a merciful God. He continually turned their minds from the ‘Jerusalem that now is and which is in bondage with her children’ to the spiritual Jerusalem above which is free. Over and over again he preached to them a gospel that came down from heaven, a message that defies human reason and dives deep into the caverns of mystery. And because it came from heaven it was a message that could actually save sinners. No doubt this message was nothing ever heard before; a mystery of sorts, a message that couldn’t be expressed by common Greek or Hebrew. It was a message so heavenly and wild that no one on earth could possibly understand it apart from God’s heavenly translator; the Holy Spirit. But for all this the Galatians grew afraid of living under grace and soon after Paul left they returned to a domesticated religion of circumcision and law keeping. This led to Paul’s letter to them, a letter filled with incredulity, fire and warning. His point was simple: you Galatians have adopted a religion of earth and i want you to know that the religions of earth and the religions of heaven are totally incompatible and mutually exclusive. You cannot please God by your earthly religion of circumcision. He spoke with fighting words. Never before or since had Paul sounded this way.

But Paul was not a man to persuade by yelling. He must again give the Galatian churches the Biblical warrant for this gospel which came directly from God and alone was the way of salvation.

So let us ask ourselves, ‘is it true that only a message that comes directly from heaven will save a soul and only a message originating with God can actually forgive a sinner”’ This is a question that must be answered. We now turn to do a quick survey of the Bible to show that only truths that originate from heaven can save while all natural religions, moral or immoral, damn.

Let us start with the words of Jesus Himself. Have you ever wondered why Jesus was never understood by others and why He was the victim of false accusations and slander? Truly, no man has ever been more misunderstood. Jesus wasn’t primarily killed because men hated Him but because men did not understand what he was doing and what men don’t understand they try to eliminate. The reason no one understood Jesus was because He actually did not come from earth, but from heaven. All men are born on earth in a mother’s womb and thus they know and love earthly things. But Jesus ‘came down from heaven’. He was a true alien. This is why whenever he spoke men were scratching their heads. But He had the only message that saved. And for this reason John the Baptist pointed men away from himself to Jesus, for Jesus had a message from heaven while his message was from earth. He said,

‘He who comes from above is above all; he who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of the earth. He who comes from heaven is above all. And what He has seen and heard, that He testifies; and no one receives His testimony. He who has received His testimony has certified that God is true. For He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God does not give the Spirit by measure’ (John 3:31-32).

John knew that he must decrease while Jesus must increase. The heavenly message must replace the earthly one. John knew that his message could not save anyone. He also knew that he and his message had finished their mission. It was time now for the heavenly messenger to take center stage. The message of repentance would drift into oblivion and Jesus’ message of God’s grace to sinners would rise to heights of glory.

So Jesus began to preach. Yet there seemed to be few who understood. Jesus tells us the reason. This true knowledge of God can only come by the power of Him revealing Himself to dead sinners. In Matthew 11:25-27 Jesus says these words,

‘At that time Jesus answered and said, “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight. All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.’

Jesus had just said many difficult things about the perilous position of some privileged Jewish cities. These blessed places he He calls ‘the wise and the prudent.’ They had all the religion in the world, and were on top of the world, but none of that helped them find God. What they needed was a divine visitation, a revelation of the truth. They needed to have Jesus come down from heaven and reveal the true God to them. But they preferred their religion. Paul had essentially said the same thing to the highly Hellenized Corinthians. They had all the books and knowledge at their disposal. They knew and studied the philosophers. They had the best education the earth could offer. Yet Paul came to them in fear and trembling and gave them the one thing they needed, the good new of a Savior who died a shameful death to save sinners, a gift that was ‘without money and without price.’ And from the ashes of that death He arose again promising a new life to all who trusted Him. He told the Corinthians:

‘For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.’

For Jews the person of Jesus got in their way by being the wrong kind of Messiah. They therefore stumbled over Him and rejected Him. For the Greeks the gospel was sheer foolishness. Who wanted a religion where material things were honored? Paul understood that neither Jews nor Greeks could understand this heavenly message. It landed on their ears like a dud. Paul understood why, ‘for the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.’ Paul knew that the message he preached was completely new to men. And men of this earth can never comprehend something heavenly. But all that didn’t deter Paul. He kept preaching the message of heaven so that in His mercy God might grant to them the faith to believe.

Even the apostles needed God’s help to understand the gospel. Walking around with Jesus for three plus years did not grant them a special understanding of His message. They too needed divine illumination. When Peter made His great statement about Jesus at Caesarea Philippi, ‘you are the Christ, the Son of the living God’, Jesus noted that Peter could only say this because it had been revealed to Him by the Father.

‘Flesh and blood did not reveal it to you but my Father who is in heaven’ (Mt 16:17).

So what is the point? Simply this; we, as Christians need to stop seeing Christianity as a natural phenomenon that comes to people via natural means like argumentation, political ideology, coercion, spiritual disciplines, pietistic self-evaluation, godly church government or the like. Nothing can enable one to understand things from the heavens except a direct spiritual invasion by the heavenly One Himself. Thus, the biggest danger to the church today is trying to make religion more tame, user friendly and earthly. The danger is to take a heavenly faith and codify it and wrap it up it into a neat package. Men love nice moral systems that work by human effort. What men hate is grace, pure, delicious grace. In other words they love earth and hate heaven. So what the church needs - what the church has always needed - is for God to come down and bring to man’s soul the heavenly gospel message. This message must be returned to its rightful place as the centerpiece of all godly enterprises. Do we have a role to play in this? Of course. First, we must be purposeful to preach the gospel at all times for in the preaching of the message God supplies the very power to believe, ‘for the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.’ Second we must pray. What we cannot do God can do, so we ask Him to come down and illuminate our minds in this beautiful message. This is what Paul did. When he says to the churches there that the gospel was not ‘according to man’ Paul was admitting that He could nothing to make them believe. What he could do was to once again preach to them that old, old story, and in preaching it, God might be pleased to bring down heaven to their souls so that they might one day be transported up to heaven on the wings of that heavenly message of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.