Galatians 3:1-9, Foolish Galatians

Grove and Grotto, a marketer of “enchantment” items, shares how to know if someone is using witchcraft on you. “Here are some tell-tale signs that you may indeed be crossed, jinxed, hexed, spellbound, or bewitched: you have a lot of Witches as friends or enemies, you’re on a string of bad luck, signs and synchronicity suggest that a curse is at work, your photos and personal stuff have gone missing, you’re interacting with a person who does witchcraft all the time, you have thoughts, visions, and emotions that aren’t your own, and you sense the presence of someone else’s magick.” The Galatians didn’t have a sense that they were being bewitched, but they were.

3:1 Oh foolish Galatians, who bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was graphically displayed as crucified. 2 I only want to know this from you: Did you receive the Spirit from doing the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? 3 Are you so foolish? Though you began in the Spirit are you now going to finish in the flesh? 4 Did you suffer everything in vain, if indeed it was in vain? 5 So then, the supplying of the Spirit to you and the working of miracles among you, did it come by works of law or by the hearing of faith? 6 Like Abraham, he believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.
7 Know then that those who are of faith are the sons of Abraham. 8 Because the Scripture saw beforehand that God would be justify the Gentiles by faith, it announced the gospel beforehand to Abraham, that he would be a blessing to all the nations. 9 So then, those who are of faith are blessed with the believing Abraham. (Galatians 3:1-9)

No doubt Paul is writing with tongue in cheek, not really believing that someone put a spell on the Galatians, wishing perhaps that their abandonment of God and the gospel was beyond their control. It wasn’t. It was foolish. Paul had clearly explained the crucifixion of Jesus Messiah and its powerful deliverance of sinners. As he said to the Corinthians, when he came to them he resolved to know nothing but Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 2:1-5). This message powerfully converted the Galatians and they received the Holy Spirit upon believing. Why would they adopt another gospel when this is the one that saved them so powerfully? It made no sense.  A gospel of works did not rescue the Galatians and grant them the Holy Spirit and miracles. The gospel of faith was what they heard and that saved them.

Undoubtedly the false teachers had argued that these Galatians needed to be like Abraham and add to faith the rite of circumcision in order to be saved. But Paul shows the readers that if they wanted to be like Abraham, they needed to stand committed to a faith alone salvation. It was when Abraham believed God that he was reckoned as righteous before God. This was before he was circumcised. Abraham’s salvation was by faith alone. True sons of Abraham, then, are those who believe.

When in Scripture it says that in Abraham all nations will be blessed (Genesis 12:1-3), and nations means Gentiles, non-Jews, this anticipates the salvation of the Gentile peoples by faith, not by becoming a part of the nation of Israel and keeping her law.

Paul, then, has contradicted the false teachers, who bewitched the Galatians, by showing that they are wrong about the origin of his gospel (it was revealed to him by Christ), wrong about it coming from Jerusalem, and wrong about Scriptural support for their view. Could he stop right here and close the letter? Mission accomplished?