Lecture 22: The Thorn in the Flesh, and Galatians: The One Gospel, the Structure, and the Date

The lecture, section by section

1. The thorn in the flesh: the undisputed why

   The thorn in the flesh has become Christian idiom for chronic physical pain, and church tradition has proposed more than forty ailments, from malaria to eye disease, as Paul's affliction. But before the what comes the why, and on the why there is no dispute: because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me. Whatever it was, God allowed Satan to supply it as the standing guard against pride in a man who had seen the third heaven.

2. Weighing the what

   Three families of identification. A physical malady, the majority view through church history, so dominant that some commentators skip the question and go straight to guessing the disease. Thorny circumstances, on the model of Hosea's hedge of thorns, with the catalogue of hardships and the daily pressure of concern for all the churches in view. Or a personal foe, the position Essex reached before reading MacArthur and found they shared: the word is closer to a stake than a splinter, the phrase may be a stake for the flesh, against fleshly pride, rather than in the body; a messenger, an angelos, is personal throughout the New Testament, not a disease; and to buffet always describes active opposition. Within that family, the foe could be the false apostles collectively, a single continual opponent raised up by Satan behind the attacks from Corinth to Galatia, or the Corinthians themselves, which founders on Paul's own assurance of their sanctified standing. Essex, with MacArthur, takes the single continual opponent as strongest, declining Pollock's popular-biography guess that the opponent was Paul's estranged wife, a minority of minorities. Paul is not delivering a satanology; he names an opponent his readers would recognize, possibly demon-empowered, permitted by God.

3. The lesson of the thorn

   Paul asked three times for the thorn's removal, and God said no: not the removal of the obstacle but grace to endure it, power perfected in weakness, which is why Paul turns to boast in his weaknesses so that the power of Christ may rest on him. The application does not require duplicating Paul's thorn. God places people in every ministry, critics, opponents, the couple who changed the young pastor's diapers fifty years ago and delight to remind him, whose function under providence is to keep the servant from exalting himself. Essex's counsel: do not go hunting for your thorn or naming your opponents as Satan's emissaries; simply receive the humbling as the reminder that the strength for ministry is God's.

4. Preaching Second Corinthians

   Second Corinthians is the most personal of Paul's letters to a church, the fruit of a six-and-a-half-year relationship that forced open his heart as nowhere else, and God was pleased to make that self-disclosure inspired Scripture. MacArthur speaks of being providentially kept from preaching it until ministry had battered him enough to enter it, and Essex agrees the letter ripens later in a pastorate, though not twenty years in, and never as a cudgel about one's own critics. Preach it in concert with First Corinthians against the whole history of Paul's dealings with the church, and let a congregation learn that its responses to the word of God through the servant of God genuinely affect the servant of God.

5. Galatians: the churches, and the issue

   The churches of Galatia known from Acts are those of the first missionary journey, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, all in the Roman province of Galatia; the phrases of Acts 16 and 18 about the Phrygian and Galatian region are best taken adjectivally, not as evidence of otherwise unrecorded churches in the ethnic north. The letter's issue is concrete. After the first journey, men from Judea taught, unless you are circumcised you cannot be saved, and a circumcision party pressed the same in Jerusalem; a Judaizer is precisely one who compels Gentiles to live like Jews, and circumcision was the threshold. The letter breathes it: Titus, a Greek, was not compelled to be circumcised; Peter feared the party of the circumcision; I testify that every man who receives circumcision is under obligation to keep the whole law; neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. The question before the Galatian churches was whether to submit to the knife, and Paul writes to say that to do so is to fall from grace into another gospel, which is no gospel at all: even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach a contrary gospel, let him be accursed.

6. The two columns

   The letter's themes fall into two columns Paul will not let touch. Law, works, and flesh stand on one side; faith, hearing, and Spirit on the other. His single diagnostic question drives it home: did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? The Spirit is received by the hearing of faith and the life continues the way it began, walking by the Spirit with the flesh crucified: the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God. Beneath both columns lies justification, God declaring righteous the one who believes, and over it all grace, named even more densely in short Galatians than in Romans: the whole work, beginning to end, unearned.

7. The three-pronged attack

   As in Second Corinthians, Paul's emphases disclose the accusations. First, that he was a latecomer apostle whose message derived, incompletely, from Jerusalem; chapters 1 and 2 answer that he received the gospel by direct revelation of Jesus Christ, preached immediately in Damascus and Arabia before ever seeing Jerusalem, met only Cephas and James briefly three years on, and when he finally laid his gospel before the pillars they added nothing and gave him the right hand of fellowship as an equal. Second, that his gospel was incomplete and needed the supplement of circumcision; chapters 3 and 4 argue the completeness of justification by faith from Abraham onward. Third, that his gospel of freedom produced loose living; chapter 5 answers that freedom is no opportunity for the flesh, for the Spirit-directed life bears fruit the law never produced. The agreed purpose: Paul declared and defended the gospel of justification by faith and its implications for these Gentile believers.

8. The structure debate

   The salutation of 1:1 to 5 is elongated exactly where the letter will live: an apostle not from men, and a Christ who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from this present evil age. Then, uniquely among the letters save First Timothy, no thanksgiving: instead the statement of amazement, I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him, which serves as the transition into the body. MacArthur's classic outline runs personal, chapters 1 and 2; doctrinal, 3:1 to 4:31; practical, 5 and 6. Fung, after Bruce, moves the joints, ending the autobiography at 2:14 and beginning application at 5:13; Longenecker, after Betz's rhetorical analysis, divides the body into a rebuke section through 4:11, with 2:15 to 21 as the propositio, the thesis the arguments of 3 and 4 defend, and a request section from 4:12. Essex keeps the classic frame with one refinement borrowed from Longenecker: nothing in the text ends Paul's speech to Peter before 2:21, and that speech, we Jews know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, is indeed the letter's basic proposition, expounded from the cry, you foolish Galatians, at 3:1, with application beginning at 5:1, stand firm in freedom: first resist circumcision, then refuse the flesh its opportunity.

9. North or south Galatia?

   To whom was the letter sent? The north Galatian theory, the traditional view, posits churches among ethnic Galatians in the province's north, founded on the second journey and addressed from the third, in the mid-fifties. William Ramsay's researches at the end of the nineteenth century overturned the consensus, and today most American evangelicals hold the south Galatian view: the recipients are the known churches of the first journey. The choice matters chiefly for the date, since a northern audience forces the letter after the Jerusalem Council, while a southern audience opens the earlier options.

10. Whose visit is Galatians 2?

    The hinge is which Jerusalem visit Paul recounts in 2:1 to 10. Identifying it with Acts 9 can simply be wiped out, since in Galatians Paul goes up with Barnabas and Titus, while in Acts 9 Barnabas is already in Jerusalem vouching for a lone Paul. The main contest is between the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 and the famine visit of Acts 11. Grammatically, then after an interval of fourteen years most naturally counts from the previous visit, three years after his conversion, yielding roughly fifteen and a half to seventeen years after conversion, which lands at AD 49 and the Council; the famine-visit reading, championed by Bruce and followed by Fung and Longenecker as the majority of the southern camp, must count the fourteen years from the conversion itself, a construal, Essex suspects, no exegete would have entertained had the chronology not demanded it.

11. Essex's position: an unrecorded visit, and a letter before the Council

    Essex holds a fourth position, and cheerfully admits he is lonely in it: the visit of Galatians 2 is an unrecorded journey to Jerusalem in the spring of AD 49, after the first missionary journey and before the Council. Acts, as the Corinthian correspondence proved, does not record all Paul's travels. Mark's early return to Jerusalem meant the church there knew Paul was receiving Gentiles without circumcision, so at the journey's end Paul privately laid his gospel before the pillars, who added nothing; that summer Cephas came to Antioch, feared the circumcision party, and drew even Barnabas into hypocrisy until Paul withstood him to his face; and word then arrived that the same men were unsettling Galatia. Paul could not wait for a Jerusalem ruling, lest the Galatians be circumcised before it came; he wrote at once. The decisive argument is the missing decree: after AD 49 Paul carried the Council's decision through these very churches, yet Galatians never cites it, arguing instead from autobiography and theology with full fury, which is hard to conceive if an official ruling already lay in his satchel. So position A is right on the chronology of the fourteen years, position B right that the letter precedes the Council, and the combination is D: Galatians, written from Antioch in AD 49, very possibly the earliest of Paul's letters.

1. On the thorn, the why is certain and the what is not, and Essex counsels wrestling with the text without losing sleep over it. How do you profit from a passage whose main point is clear while its details stay disputed?

2. Paul pronounced a curse on any preacher, himself or an angel included, who altered the gospel. What does that severity teach about the difference between secondary disagreements and another gospel?

3. The Galatians began by the Spirit and were tempted to be perfected by the flesh. Where do Christians today quietly shift from the hearing of faith to the works of the law in their ongoing walk?