Galatians 1:10 - Pleasing man or pleasing God?

1:10

We are now going to enter a narrative section where Paul will explain and defend his apostleship. This verse forms a link between the opening of the letter and the narrative section. Note that Paul has just said it is the message that counts above all, not the messenger. Yet now he is going to spend some time justifying himself. Why is this? The reason is that the Judaisers would almost certainly have attacked Paul’s character. We certainly know that this happened in Corinth. We don’t know precisely what they accused him of, but can make various inferences from what we find Paul saying in this letter. It seems that one of accusations was that Paul was seeking to please men. And now we need to remind ourselves what the false teaching was, which is that the Galatians needed to be circumcised in order to truly please God. So the accusation may have been that Paul only said that the Galatians did not need to be circumcised because he was trying to please the Gentiles, to make himself and the message more acceptable to them. He was a man pleaser. Paul utterly rejects such accusations, and says that if he was trying to please man he most certainly would not be a servant of Jesus Christ. Too often we have the notion that we can make Christianity and the gospel “nice”, acceptable to man. This is not true, it is not the teaching of Jesus, it is not what we read about in the New Testament. Now man has not changed in the last two thousand years, he is still a rebellious sinner. The gospel preaches change, preaches acknowledging our guilt, preaches repenting of our sins, preaches putting our trust only in Christ. All this is naturally offensive to natural man.

So why does Paul defend himself when it is the message that counts above all? Because the messenger actually is important. It is important that we live lives of integrity. We are  not and cannot be perfect, but we must seek to live godly lives. For when a leader is proved to be a fraud it adversely affects the faith of people. The Galatians needed to trust Paul and to understand him so that they would be more likely to accept what he was going to say, and remember that he takes a pretty tough line with them in this letter. So Paul will now embark on a pretty lengthy explanation and defence of his ministry, in particular how he got the gospel, and his relation to the other apostles.