Men should glorify God because he gave to us our being. He is our founder; our life is from him. But the testimony of Scripture is that all men fall short of the glory of God; it is not intrinsic in our sinful nature to seek to glorify God. Men walk in their own counsels according to their own wills, putting themselves under the dark cloud of the just judgment of God.
But God, out of his love, sent his Son into the world to become a man who would live as Jesus said of himself in John 8: “I seek not mine own glory, but the glory of him who sent me.” God’s will for Jesus was for him to redeem sinners by dying for them, thus justly reconciling them to God that they may see the glory of God and declare his praise.
The gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, is according to the will of God for his own glory (Galatians 1:5). Paul wrote the epistle of Galatians because of the substitution of a false gospel for the true gospel, an error that the Galatian churches had been led into by false teachers.
In Galatians 1:11-12, Paul makes two very important points. The first is that the true gospel did not come from man: “For I would have you know brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me was not man’s gospel.” Man’s gospel will always leave room for man to boast.
The phrase “would have you know” is a word of certainty; I “certify” to you or “declare assuredly” to you. Jesus used this word in his prayer to his Father: “I ‘declared’ to them your name and will ‘declare’ it that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). None can accomplish salvation but Christ, whom God sent to men.
Christ came into the world to testify to the truth, and the truth is that all glory belongs to God. The gospel comes from God. Adding anything to it or taking anything away from it corrupts the truth and gives man something to glorify in himself rather than God. False gospels from men abound, but there is only one gospel that came from God.
The second point Paul makes is that he received the gospel “through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” Christ directly imparted to Paul knowledge of the gospel, so that Paul understood that the prophets had written of Christ. The scope of all Scripture was to reveal a way of salvation through a promised Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
Paul learned that the one he had been persecuting was none other than the eternal, glorious Son of God, that Christ was not only man, but God and true man. Christ was a divine person with the nature of man and the nature of God. While his divine nature was not affected, the person who died on the cross was a divine person. Paul writes to the Corinthians this about Christ’s death: “They crucified the Lord of glory.”
Who Christ is gives his death its infinite value and efficacy: his death makes full satisfaction of justice, presents unclean sinners as righteous before God, gives them access to God, and earns the gift of the Holy Spirit for them.
In Christ’s death, we see the highest display of divine perfections. The holy angels benefit from Christ’s death because it gives them a deeper and more comprehensive knowledge of God’s glory. They see the harmony of God’s mercy and justice, holiness and love, and how greatly the recipients of God’s grace benefit, that the Son of God was their sin bearer and stood in their place, that not only are their sins forgiven, but they are treated as objects of God’s favor and infinite love.
Christ’s death is the most important event in history, the central point of history. His death is the ground of all our confidence before God—there is no other—and it is all sufficient. There is great guilt in ignoring it, rejecting it, neglecting it, or despising it, but the greatest guilt is in distorting it as if it wasn’t all sufficient to justify the sinner.
The promise of the gospel is that whoever believes in Christ shall not perish but have everlasting life. This cheers the heart of the man who knows he cannot save himself, but he who lacks grace will never rely on Christ alone.
