"Revelation is the abolition of
religion.” Karl Barth
“But I certify you,
brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man.” Gal1:11
Paul is now making it clear that the gospel which he
preached to the Galatians, the very gospel which they heard and received was
not a gospel of human origin. It did not originate from him or from any other
men or group but from God Himself who gave it to him that he might preach it
unto the Gentiles.
It was not something that Paul invented as his own
personal interpretation and opinion or a continued development of religious
tradition authorized by the original apostles in Jerusalem.
“For I neither
received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus
Christ.” Gal1:12
He says that the conveyance of the gospel to him was
straight from God’s supernatural activity of grace in Jesus Christ. He did not
receive it of man, but of God Himself.
Paul was very adamant that the gospel he shared did not come
through human channels. He wasn’t 'discipled' by the apostles or trained by
anyone. He did not receive the gospel through learning or mentorship. He did
not attend catechism or seminary or bible school to be instructed in the doctrines
of a Christian belief-system. None of these human endeavors. He received the
gospel through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
Look at The Message translation of this verse;
“Know this – I am most
emphatic here, friends – this great Message I delivered to you is not mere
human optimism. I didn’t receive it
through the traditions, and I wasn’t taught it in some school. I got it straight from God, received the
Message directly from Jesus Christ.” Gal1:11-12
You may wonder why there is such an emphasis by Paul on the
fact that it is God who revealed the gospel to him. The simple reason as Paul
has explained earlier lies in the fact that Jesus is both the subject and the
object of the gospel. The gospel is not just a doctrine or information that one
is taught.
The gospel is a revelation of Jesus Christ and His grace. It is
about knowing and experiencing the eternal life of God as your own life. It is
about knowing and experiencing God Himself as your new life and purpose. It
is not just gathering information and new doctrines and instructions.
As a result there is no man that can reveal the gospel unto
another man. The only way we can get it is by the revelation of Jesus Christ. Each
one of us must receive a revelation of the good news for our self.
The gospel is not just a revelation about Jesus Christ, nor
merely a revelation conveyed by Jesus Christ to a person, rather the gospel is the
revelation of Jesus Christ Himself. It is His very essence. When you receive a
revelation of the gospel, you receive a revelation of the very life and grace
of God. You receive a revelation of Christ Himself. This is the point that Paul
is attempting to make to the Galatians.
“For ye have heard of
my conversation in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I
persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: And profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own
nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.”
Gal1:13-14
We know from the book of Acts that Paul had quite a reputation
among the Christian communities concerning his pre-conversion activities when
he was still known as Saul. Luke noted that “Saul
was ravaging the church, entering house after house; and dragging off men and
women, to put them in prison” Acts 8:3, And that he was “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” Acts
9:1. When the risen Lord Jesus appeared unto him on the road to Damascus he
asked him “Saul, Saul, why are you
persecuting Me?” Acts 9:4.
There is no doubt that these false teachers had brought
this to the Galatians’ attention so as to create mistrust and suspicion towards
Paul.
Of course Paul is filled with utmost regret and remorse for
his actions is the past. He admits that he “persecuted
the church of God” in 1Cor15:9 and Phil3:6. However his admissions provide
for us some insight into religion and the religious mindset.
His commitment (just like most religion) was fueled by “zeal without knowledge” (Rom. 10:2). He
was violently obsessed in his defense of religion even to the disregard of
other people’s lives. Religion and religious people too often embrace and adopt
violent conflict against those who disagree and will not conform to their beliefs
and traditions. Mercy is a concept that does not exist in their paradigm. They
are constantly judging, persecuting, ridiculing and condemning those that
disagree with them. Mercy is an
attribute that is ever present in God and rarely present in man.
It therefore isn’t a
surprise that all the major terrorist organizations around the world are built
on religious fundamentalism. They always have a religion they are willing to go
to any end for, even unto death. From Joseph Kony’s LRA, Holy Spirit Movement
of Alice Lakwena, Jamil Mukulu’s ADF, Al Shabab, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Daesh
(ISIS) to historical groups like the medieval Christian Crusaders who massacred
Jews and muslims while fighting for Jerusalem etc.
Of course most of today’s religious Christian groups and
churches don’t kill other people. Their violence is more subtle and varies.
Today grace preachers are targeted for malicious claims, they are called false
preachers, churches forbid their members from hearing or attending meetings of
these ‘false preachers’, blogs are written on the internet about them. Their
messages are called false grace, greasy grace, sloppy agape, easy believism and
so forth. It is all persecution. Religious zeal without knowledge. We will deal
more with this in chapter four.
“But when it pleased
God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, To
reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I
conferred not with flesh and blood” Gal1:15-16
Paul now refers to the divine action of God, “Who separated me from my mother’s womb.”
It was not a coincidence or sheer luck or fate that transformed Paul into a
grace-Christian. Paul attributed what happened in his life to God’s pre-ordained
plan to sovereignly act in his life, even before he was born. Here we see
grace. God acting by his unmerited, unearned, undeserved favor to advance and
advantage us.
Paul recognizes that
God ordained and planned to separate him “unto
the gospel of God” Rom1:1 just
like He had done with John the Baptist (Lk1:10-17), the prophet Isaiah (Isa.
49:1,6) and the prophet Jeremiah (Jer1:5) before him.
Paul is saying to us that
God does select and call an individual “even from his mother’s womb” for His
divine purposes. Indeed this is a principle that we see throughout scripture.
God has a specific purpose for each one of us. A purpose which he ordained for
us even before we were conceived by our mothers. This is what Psalm139:13-18
and Ephesians2:10 teach. Our job then becomes to find out what it is and follow
through and fulfill it. But that is a topic for another day
Notice that God did not just give Paul factual data,
information, doctrine or theology about Christ, but He “revealed His Son” in him. It was the personal revelation of the
life and reality of the Son of God indwelling Paul’s spirit and living in Paul
as his life.
The purpose of this revelation of Jesus Christ in Paul was “that I might preach Him among the
Gentiles.” Paul’s conversion and commissioning both occurred on the road to
Damascus as we see in Acts 9:3-22; Acts 22:6-21 and Acts 26:12-18. Notice that
he was commissioned to “preach Him,”
Jesus Christ, and not some denominational creed or some organized package of
doctrine. Jesus is the subject and the object, the dynamic and the content of
genuine Christian gospel preaching. This is a very important issue to deal
with. Let us camp here a while.
REVELATION
KNOWLEDGE
Ephesians1
15 Therefore I also,
after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints,
16 do not cease to
give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers:
17 that the God of our
Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom
and revelation in the knowledge of Him,
18 the eyes of your
understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His
calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints
You would think that knowing Christ begins when God teaches
you something you don’t know about Jesus. You get new information or a new
understanding concerning Christ. After all this is the way we naturally learn everything
else. We obtain new information and as a result add another layer to our
understanding of a concept. This is natural.
However, knowing Christ doesn’t work like this at all.
Instead God always seeks first to teach us something we don’t know about knowing.
In other words, God wants for us to understand that the way we seek to know
and understand Him is not the way He seeks to be known and understood.
There is a way to know God that is not natural to us. A way
that doesn’t involve our usual gathering and computing and compiling of new
information with our brains in order to make a logical conclusion and establish
a new belief. This is how the natural mind operates. And yet our natural minds
cannot know the things of God because God is spiritual. God seeks to first deal
with us about a different kind of knowing and seeing and learning. A spiritual
way to know God.
So Paul prays for the Ephesian church that they will receive
the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God which will lead to the
eyes of their understanding being enlightened so that they may know the way God
wants them to know. We are going to expound on this as we go along.
One of the greatest hindrances to truly knowing and
experiencing the Lord is our familiarity with biblical words and spiritual
concepts. We have become far more acquainted with the words and concepts themselves
than with the spiritual realities that these words describe.
If I say grace or faith or love or the Cross or
righteousness, there is already a definition in your mind of what that is. You
have already confined that word or concept to a certain meaning of it you
already have. This meaning you could have acquired from a preacher, mentor,
your own study, experience, history and so forth. This word cannot therefore
mean anything to you other than what you have already defined it to mean in
your heart. You have already settled it
in your mind. This is a major hindrance to knowing God.
THE BOX
CALLED DISGUSTING!
In one of our classes we used a very interesting
illustration to understand this truth. Imagine that I handed you a box with the
word ‘disgusting’ written on top. There is nothing really wrong with this. It's just the word ‘disgusting’ on a box. The word disgusting isn’t necessarily
‘disgusting’. It doesn’t smell or feel
or look bad. It’s just a word. However
you will immediately start defining the contents of that box in your mind. You
will imagine something that looks nasty or smells terrible or something filthy
or whatever. You might even get out your phone and check the dictionary for the
meaning of the word. But here is my point, as long as ‘disgusting’ is just a word
on a box, your imagination gets to define the contents. It all depends on your
information, past experience or prior knowledge of the word disgusting. But it
is not based on a present reality or experience of disgusting. It is not truth.
So eventually curiosity gets the best of you, and you decide
that you must open the box. On opening it you discover a container of the filthiest
most revolting substance you have ever encountered. It is vile beyond
description and offensive to all of your senses. The room immediately fills
with the worst stench you have ever encountered. Your eyes are teary, you gag
and throw up, you feel sick already and throw the box as far as you can, and
rush out of that room totally disgusted. Question is, what happened?
The contents of the box have defined the word ‘disgusting’. Experiencing what was inside the box has cast
down your imagination and replaced it with the truth. Your understanding of
disgusting is no longer what you read from Google search or Webster, it is no
longer some definition you had in your mind or a past experience. It is now a
present reality. You may not be able to define what the word means using
appropriate words, you may not be able to write an essay on the word disgusting
but now you know exactly what that word means. You have received revelation
knowledge of that word. The word is more real to you than any definition by the
best English professor in the world. He has an argument or a theory but you
have an experience.
And the next time I give you a similar box, the word
disgusting will be far more than a word to you. It will mean much more. This
word has now been defined and filled with meaning because of your encounter and
experience with the substance behind it.
The Word of God is like this. We can say that the Bible is a
collection of word packages that cannot be truly known until you are confronted
with their contents. The words of Scripture are a wonderful gift from God, but
we are meant to see past the words and behold the Lord Himself.
God's desire is not that we necessarily identify correct
biblical concepts and correctly define them with our mind. Christianity is not
an exam that we have to have all this information to answer certain questions.
God doesn’t really care whether you can define what grace or faith or
righteousness or the Cross is. He wants you to receive, know, and experience
the life and grace of His Son behind these words and concepts!
It is a turning point in our life when we realize that we
do not know what we think we know unless God has revealed it to our heart.
Paul says something similar in 1Cor8:2 when he says this; “And if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet
as he ought to know.”
We can read God’s words as much as we like, but real
spiritual communication begins when the reality behind these words, the actual
substance of which they speak, is shown to us. This is what revelation is.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God.” Jn1:1
We understand that the Word mentioned here is a reference to
the pre-incarnate Son of God, but fail to ask why He is given this name. Why is
Jesus called the Word of God?
The answer is simple. Jesus is, in His very being, what is
real and true of God, and what God desires to make known to us. Jesus is God
communicating Himself to us in a way that we can experience and understand Him.
Hebrews1:3 calls Him “the
brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.” In other
words, He represents all that God is, and all that He knows, wants,
understands, and loves.
He is the manifestation of God in bodily form. To see Him is
to see the Father; (Jn14:7-11) to receive the Word is to receive the One who
sends Him. He is called the wisdom and righteousness of God (1Cor1:30), the truth
of God (Jn14:6), the love of God (1Jn4:9-10), and God is using this perfect
Word (Jesus) to communicate Himself to the human soul.
“No one has seen God
at anytime. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has
declared Him.” Jn1:18
God unveils and communicates Himself to the human heart
through this one perfect Word. When the Father reveals His Son, He is saying
all that there is to say. Knowing
Jesus is knowing God.
But like the Pharisees we diligently study the Scriptures
thinking that we shall find life in mere words written in a book. We fail to
connect to the one of whom these words speak. Look at what Jesus said to them;
“You search the
Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they
which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have
life.” Jn5:39-40
We assume that by studying
and learning the Bible we will thereby come to know the Lord. We think that
doing bible courses, going to bible studies, attending fellowships will cause
us to know God. This isn’t necessarily true. Devoid of revelation knowledge
from the Holy Spirit to you personally, it is simply an accumulation of more
information about God. The apostle Paul communicated this truth to the
Corinthians very well;
1Corinthians 2
11 For what man knows
the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no
one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.
12 Now we have
received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that
we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.
13 These things we
also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit
teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
14 But the natural
man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness
to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
15 But he who is
spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one.
16 For "who has
known the mind of the LORD that he may instruct Him?" But we have the mind
of Christ.
To truly know another person you have to participate in or
somehow partake of what is inside of them. With natural relationships in
physical bodies this is very limited since we can’t enter into other people. We
can never fully see or know the inner life of another human. When we hear
somebody’s words, we often have no idea what is really behind them. They can
say they are happy but when they are very sad.
But this is not the case in a Christian’s relationship with
God! God has made it possible for us to truly experience Him and His life and
grace. He has granted us access to the deep things of God by giving us His very
Spirit. We not only have His words, but we also have the Spirit of Truth resident
within us, and He wants nothing more than to show us the things that have been
freely given to us by God.
Spiritual understanding or what we know as revelation
knowledge is not OUR understanding of spiritual things. Rather, spiritual
understanding is the understanding OF the spirit Himself. That is to say the
way the Holy Spirit understands and knows God. His knowledge of God.
Revelation knowledge then is when the Holy Spirits takes
His understanding and knowledge of God or of spiritual things and deposits that same
understanding and knowledge in us so that now we understand as He understands and know as He knows. It is not
that we figure out a spiritual truth or logically work it out, that’s not it at
all. The Holy Spirit by His unction takes His knowledge of God and imparts it
to us. It is a revelation to us. He reveals something to our understanding.
Look at this scripture;
“But the anointing
which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone
teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is
true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you will abide in Him”
1Jn2:27
Anything we saw Jesus doing for His disciples while He was
on the earth is exactly what the Holy Spirit does for the Christian now. We see
Jesus constantly teaching His disciples, we see Him constantly instructing,
guiding, explaining, revealing and opening their understanding to spiritual
truth. This is what the Holy Spirit does for us now. And yet His ministry is
even better. He doesn’t just explain these things to our minds like Jesus did
with the apostles. This is why Jesus told His disciples that it was to their advantage for Him to go away and send the Holy Spirit to them;
"Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you." Jn16:7
The Holy Spirit is able to deliver His understanding and
knowledge of these things in us in such a way that suddenly we just understand
a spiritual truth. It’s like somebody switches on the light in your mind and
suddenly you can see a truth. The Holy Spirit works from the inside. From our
spirit which has the mind of Christ and “is
renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him” Col3:10
All of us have experienced this to some degree. We usually
describe it as the words of scripture jumping off a page. One moment you are
reading a scripture and suddenly it just comes alive to you. You may not even
fully understand what it means but you just experience life from it. It’s like
the scripture does something inside you, you feel that it is alive and anointed.
This is the Holy Spirit giving you revelation knowledge, making the written
Word to become “living and powerful, and
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and
spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and
intents of the heart.” Heb4:12
Too bad that most of us don’t know how to receive this
ministry of the Holy Spirit more frequently and in a way that impacts our
lives. I’m believing God that we are going to learn how to receive this.
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