1 O foolish Galatians, who bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?
2 This is the only thing I want to learn from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?
3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
4 Did you suffer so many things for nothing—if indeed it was for nothing? 5 So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?
Quotes:
“One of the devil’s favorite stratagems is to distort the truth so that people can no longer tell the difference between the one true Gospel and all the false alternatives.” (Dr. Philip Graham Ryken)
“No ritual, ceremony, regulation, or any other thing devised or accomplished by men can pick up where the cross leaves off—because the cross never leaves off. The cross is the continuing and eternal payment for all sin, and every sinner who puts his trust in the cross is forever and continually being forgiven.” (Dr. John MacArthur)
“These being the facts of their experience, Paul argues, it is ludicrous that, ‘having begun with the Spirit’, they should now expect to complete ‘with the flesh’. This is another way of saying that, having begun with the gospel, they must not go back to the law, imagining that the law was needed to supplement the gospel. To do so would be not ‘improvement’ but ‘degeneracy’.” (John R. W. Stott)
