Beginning

Paul says ‘hello’

1 This letter is from me, Paul. I am an apostle of Jesus Christ. It is not any group of people or any one person that has given that authority to me. It is Jesus Christ himself who has chosen me to serve him. And God our Father, who raised Jesus to become alive again after his death, has also sent me. ² All the believers who are here say ‘hello’ to you. We all send this letter to you.

I am writing to you, the people of the churches that are in Galatia.

³ I pray that God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ will continue to help you. I pray that they will give you peace in your minds. ⁴ Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice because of all the wrong things that we have done. He did that to save us from all the bad things of this world in which we live now. This is what God, our Father, wanted him to do. ⁵ God is great and we should praise him for ever. Amen. This is true.

The true message of good news

⁶ I am very surprised that you are turning away so soon from God. He is the one who chose you to come to him. He did that because Christ is very kind to you. But now you want to accept a different message which some people call good news. ⁷ But really, there is no other message from God which is good news. Some people are confusing you. They are trying to change the good news about Christ and make it something different. ⁸ Nobody should ever teach a message that is different from the good news that we taught you. Neither we ourselves, nor even an angel from heaven, should ever teach a different message. If anyone does that, I pray that God would curse him. ⁹ We have already said this, but now I will say it again. Do not accept any message that is different from the message that we taught you. If anyone teaches a different message, I pray that God will curse him very strongly.

¹⁰ When I say these things, I am not trying to please people. No, it is God that I want to please. If I only wanted to make people happy, then I would not be a servant of Christ.

Paul's message is from God

¹¹ The good news that I tell people did not come from any person on earth. I want you to know that, my friends. ¹² Nobody on earth gave it to me. Nobody taught it to me. No, it was Jesus Christ himself who showed it to me clearly.

¹³ You know about the things that I did before, when I obeyed the Jewish rules. I caused very much trouble against God's church. I tried to destroy those people completely. ¹⁴ I obeyed the Jewish rules better than many other Jews who were my friends. I tried very much to obey the ideas that our Jewish ancestors taught. ¹⁵ But God had chosen me to serve him even before I was born. He chose me to be his servant because he is very kind. ¹⁶ He decided to show his Son clearly to me, so that I could tell the Gentiles about him.^[a] When God chose me to do that, I did not talk about it with any person. ¹⁷ Nor did I go to Jerusalem to see Christ's apostles there. Those men were already his apostles before I was. But I did not go to talk to them. Instead, I went immediately to the region of Arabia.^[b] Later, I went back to the city of Damascus.

¹⁸ Then, three years later, I did go to Jerusalem. I stayed there with Christ's apostle Peter for 15 days, so that he could teach me. ¹⁹ I did not see any other apostles, except James, who is the Lord's brother. ²⁰ God knows that what I am writing to you is completely true! ²¹ Later, I went to different places in Syria and Cilicia.^{[c] 22} The Christians in the churches in Judea had never met me.^{[d] 23} They had only heard people say this about me: ‘This man caused bad trouble against us Christians before. He tried to destroy God's message about Jesus. But now he himself is telling people the good news about Jesus, so that they believe.’ ²⁴ When the believers in Judea heard that, they praised God because of me.

The apostles in Jerusalem accept Paul

2 14 years later, I went to Jerusalem again. This time I went with Barnabas, and I also took Titus with me. ² I went there because God had shown me that I should go. I talked to the Christian leaders there. I explained to them the good news that I teach to the Gentiles. But I talked only to those men who seemed to be the leaders. I wanted to be sure that they agreed with the message that I taught. I did not want my work, both in past times and now, to be worth nothing. ³ Titus was with me then. He is a Greek person and nobody had circumcised him. But the leaders in Jerusalem did not say that we must circumcise him.^[e]

⁴ But some men did want us to obey all the Jewish rules. Those men came secretly among our group. They said that they were believers, but they were not really true believers. They wanted to see how we lived as believers. They wanted to know how Christ Jesus has made us free from the Jewish rules. They wanted to make us slaves to those rules. ⁵ But we did not allow them to do this to us. They wanted to spoil the true good news that you have believed. We kept the good news safe for you.

⁶ The church leaders in Jerusalem did not argue with me. (They were the people who seemed to be the leaders. It does not matter to me whether they were really important people or not. God does not respect some people more than others.) Those leaders did not tell me to change the message that I teach. ⁷ Instead they saw that God had given a special job to me. God wanted me to tell the good news about Christ to the Gentiles. In the same way, he had told Peter to tell the good news to the Jews. ⁸ God gave Peter the authority to be his apostle to the Jews. God also gave me the authority to be his apostle to the Gentiles.

⁹ James, Peter and John understood that God had given this special job to me. They are the leaders that the church in Jerusalem respects. And they were happy to accept Barnabas and me as their friends. They agreed that we should teach God's message to the Gentiles. They themselves would continue to teach the Jews. ¹⁰ They only asked us to do this: We should remember to help the poor people among their group. That is something that I myself wanted very much to do.

Paul argues with Peter

¹¹ But later, when Peter came to Antioch, I spoke against him. I told him clearly that he had done something wrong. ¹² When he first arrived in Antioch, Peter had been eating meals with the Gentile believers there. Then James sent some Jewish believers from Jerusalem to Antioch. After those men had arrived, Peter started to keep himself separate from the Gentiles. He stopped eating meals with them. He was afraid of those Jews who wanted to circumcise the Gentile believers. ¹³ The other Jewish believers in Antioch also did what Peter did. They became hypocrites like him. Even Barnabas agreed and he copied their example.

¹⁴ But I could see that they were wrong to do this. They were not living in a way that agrees with God's true message. So I spoke to Peter in front of all of them. I said to him, ‘You were born as a Jew, but you have been living like a Gentile. As a believer, you no longer obey all the Jewish rules. So you should not try to make Gentile believers obey those Jewish rules.’

¹⁵ We were born as Jewish people. We are not Gentiles who have never obeyed God's rules. ¹⁶ But we know that we do not become right with God because we obey his Law. A person only becomes right with God when they believe in Jesus Christ. And we, as Jewish believers, have believed in Christ Jesus. We have become right with God because we trust in what Christ has done. It is not because we obey God's Law that he accepts us. Nobody becomes right with God only because they obey the rules in God's Law.

¹⁷ So then, we Jews become right with God when we believe in Christ. That means that we no longer obey all the Jewish rules. But that does not mean that Christ causes us to do wrong things. Certainly, it does not mean that! ¹⁸ Instead, I would really be doing something wrong if I tried to obey all those rules again. I would be building again something that I had destroyed. That would really be against God's Law. ¹⁹ But God's Law showed me that I could never obey all its rules. So I became like a dead person, free from the authority of those rules. That means that I can now live to please God.^[f]

²⁰ Christ died on the cross on my behalf. It is like I died there with him. So I do not live my own life any more. Instead, Christ lives in me. The life that I live now in my body, I live because I trust what he has done for me. He has loved me so much that he died on my behalf. ²¹ So I do not refuse to accept the kind gift of God. If the rules of God's Law could make me right with him, then Christ would have died for no reason!

We become right with God when we trust Jesus

3 You Christians in Galatia are like fools! Someone has taught you to believe crazy ideas! I taught you clearly that Jesus Christ died on the cross as a sacrifice on our behalf. You understood that. ² So think about this: When you received God's Spirit, was it because you had obeyed the rules of God's Law? No! You received God's Spirit because you heard the message about Christ and you believed it. ³ Do not think like fools! You first became believers by the help of God's Spirit. So do not try now to continue by your own human power. That will never get you to the end! ⁴ You have had many troubles as believers. I want those troubles to help you. Surely they could not be without any good purpose. ⁵ God gives to you the gift of his Spirit. He also does powerful miracles among you. But he does not do these things because you obey the rules of his Law. No, he does them because you believed the message about Christ which you heard.

⁶ Think about our Jewish ancestor Abraham. We know this: ‘Abraham believed God. As a result, God accepted Abraham as right with him’. ⁷ So you should understand who Abraham's children really are. It is those people who trust God. ⁸ The Bible already said what would happen at a future time. It said that God would make the Gentiles right with himself, if they believed in him. God showed this good news to Abraham a long time before it happened. He said to Abraham, ‘I will bless people from all countries because of you.’^{[g] 9} So then, God did not bless only Abraham when he trusted God. God also blesses all people who trust him like Abraham did.

¹⁰ But some people try to obey all the rules of God's Law. They think that they will become right with God if they do this very well. But God will speak against people like that and he will punish them. It is written in the Bible: ‘God will punish everyone who does not always obey all the rules in his Law completely.’^{[h] 11} We know that the Law can not cause anyone to become right with God. That is clear because the Bible says, ‘The person that God has accepted as right will live because they trust him.’^[i]

¹² But the Law does not tell people to trust God. It tells people about all the things that they must do. The Bible says, ‘The person who obeys all the rules in God's Law completely will live’. ¹³ So God's Law shows that it is right for God to punish us. But Christ took that punishment away from us, because God punished him instead of us. It says in the Bible: ‘When people hang someone on a tree to kill him, it shows that God has cursed that person.’^{[j] 14} Christ died in that way so that God would bless the Gentiles in the way that he blessed Abraham. Also, if we believe in Christ, we can then receive God's Spirit that he promised.

God's promise to Abraham still has authority

¹⁵ My Christian friends, I will use an example from our lives. Two people may make an agreement together and they both agree to it properly. If they do that, nobody else can change that agreement. They cannot take away its authority. ¹⁶ In the same way, God promised to bless Abraham and Abraham's descendant. The Bible does not say ‘descendants’. It does not speak about ‘many people’. No, God promised to bless Abraham's descendant. He speaks about one person, and that person is Christ.^{[k] 17} What I mean is this: God made an agreement with Abraham. He promised to bless him. Then, 430 years later, God gave his Law to Moses for the Jewish people. But that Law could not take away the authority of God's agreement with Abraham. It could not stop what God had already promised. ¹⁸ God has promised to give good things to his children. But that does not happen as a result of God's Law. If that were true, then we would not receive God's good things as a result of his promise. But God gave those good things to Abraham as a gift, because he had promised to bless Abraham.

The purpose of God's Law

¹⁹ So we could ask: Why did God give his Law to his people after his promise to Abraham? He gave his Law to show them which things are wrong. It would have authority until Abraham's special descendant would come. That was the descendant that God had promised to bless. God used angels to give his Law to his people.^[l] It was Moses who received the Law from God, and Moses then took it to God's people. ²⁰ But God himself gave his promise to Abraham. It was not necessary to have somebody in between, like Moses.

²¹ So should we say that God's Law works against God's promises? No, certainly that is not true! It is not possible for the rules of any law to give us life with God. If that could happen, then God would have accepted us as right if we obeyed those rules. ²² But the Bible says that sin has power over everyone. People can not get free. This means that we can only receive what God has promised when we trust Jesus Christ. God gives his promise to those who believe.

²³ But before God showed us the way of faith, the Law had authority over us. God's Law kept us safe, until God showed us that we must believe in Christ. ²⁴ In that way, God's Law was like our guide. It kept us safe until Christ came. Then God could accept us as right because we trusted Christ. ²⁵ But now that the way of faith in Christ has come, we do not need God's Law to keep us safe any longer.

²⁶ All of you are God's children because you believe in Christ Jesus. ²⁷ They baptized you as believers in Christ. That means that you have put on Christ, like someone who puts on new clothes. ²⁸ It does not matter whether you are a Jew or a Gentile. It does not matter whether you are a slave or a free person. It does not matter whether you are a man or a woman. You all belong together because you all belong to Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are descendants of Abraham. Because of that, you will receive all the good things that God promised to Abraham.