Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1546
“O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ has been evidently set forth, crucified among you?” Galatians 3:1.
WITH very great enthusiasm the Galatians received the Gospel when Paul preached it to them. They seem to have been a very warm-hearted but fickle people and Paul found to his great grief that while he was away from them, certain false teachers came in and turned them aside from the Gospel which he had delivered to them. He spoke out very plainly about the matter. In this verse he uses very strong terms, while he says to them—“O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth?” I do not know that any such witchery has fallen upon any of you, but I do know that, being men, we are all subject to the same dangers and I know, also, that there is a witchery in the very air at this time so that many are to be found throughout the Churches of this land to whom these words might be justly spoken.
We can only hope to escape this evil which Paul so severely condemns by the use of right cautionary means. It is only, in fact, as the Holy Spirit shall keep us that we shall be preserved from the fascinations of error and kept true to the grand old Gospel of the blessed God. At this time I shall very briefly speak, in the first place, upon the subtle danger which is hinted at here—“Who has bewitched you?” Secondly, at more length I shall speak upon the blessed preservative—there is no way of being kept from this witchery like having Christ Jesus, evidently crucified, set forth among us. And, thirdly, a few words, in closing, upon the supreme folly of any who, having tried this Divine preservative, nevertheless become bewitched by error.
I. First, then, let us think of THE SUBTLE DANGER which is always around us. It was hard work to preach the Gospel, at first, among the heathen. Men had to lay down their lives to do it. They had to propound new things which the heathen mind did not readily receive. But, by the power of the Spirit of God, converts were made and Churches were formed. And now came another difficulty. Even those that were converted, or appeared to be so, became suddenly, as it were, bewitched with error of one kind or another, just as in families children are suddenly taken ill with certain complaints which seem incidental to childhood. If parents had never heard of such things before, they would be astonished! They would suppose that they must lose their children when such unaccountable diseases suddenly appeared in them and yet they survive.
In the family of Christ certain epidemics break out at times. We cannot tell why they come when they do and, at first, perhaps, we are puzzled and perplexed to think that such diseases should come at all. But they do come and, therefore, it is well to be on our guard against them. Paul calls it being bewitched because these people fell into strange error—error which had no argument to back it—error surprising and startling. He seems to say, “I cannot make it out. I cannot understand how you should be thus misled.” In Paul’s day the error was generally that of Judaism. They wanted to go back to circumcision and to the old sacrifices of the Law. Paul was indignant enough about this. “I testify,” he said, “to everyone of you, that if he is circumcised, he is a debtor to keep the whole Law and he has fallen from Grace. If you go back to the old beggarly elements of Judaism, you are leaving Christ and rejecting Christ and imperiling your souls.”
He declares that he could not understand how they should wish to do it. He calls it witchery, for in his day it was believed that men could cast an evil spell upon one another and thus work evil upon their fellow men. It seemed to Paul to be something like that—as if the devil, himself, were in it and came and turned men away from Christ Jesus to go back to trusting in the Law and its obsolete ceremonies. And it was not long before Paul found another kind of error in the Church. There came in among the most humble Believers certain men of education who thought themselves highly intelligent—men who knew something about Socrates and Plato—and they said, “These doctrines are too plain. The poor
people understand them and they come into the Church, but no doubt they have a deeper meaning intended only for the initiated.”
So they began to spiritualize everything and, in the process, they spirited away the very Gospel itself! Paul could not endure it. He said that though he or an angel from Heaven should preach any other Gospel than that which he had preached, it would be a cursed deed! Whether it were Judaism, or Gnosticism, he smote it heavily and said to those who fell into it, “Who has bewitched you?” You who read Church history know that in later ages the Church fell into Arian-ism. There were great disputes about the Deity of Christ and the air, for a long time, was full of that deadly plague. When that battle was over and such men as Athanasius had settled the question of our Redeemer’s Godhead, then came up all the superstitions of Rome—that awful midnight, black with murky clouds, which covered the Church for ages.