Not just that Jesus was the Christ as Peter preached, but now that He also died for your sins, He was buried, and He rose from the grave, for in God's eyes and mind we were IN Him through it all and are NOW seated IN Him at the Father of spirits right and we can’t mix this up with anything else. Those who come by death into this mystery are declared son's of God. They have passed through the teachings of the first covenant, learned humility and obedience to its teaching and moved into the second by way of revelation and death. Death being the end result of the firsts teaching (the administration in which it was held) when it is rightly divided or delineated. For since Pentecost's first giving out of the Holy Spirit it has been His ministration to bring all through this revelation and then into the power of the second Adam's New Ministration and the promised New Covenant in which all are required to pass.
Now here as we've learned, some 22 years after Pentecost in about 51 AD., Paul has already established Churches throughout Asia Minor. We know that the Church at Antioch has been more or less the home base. It's where Hebrew and Gentiles were first called Christians, and where they were first interested in the things of God.
So consequently it's at Antioch that this matter really boiled over to the place that the Lord instructed Paul to go up to Jerusalem and meet with the apostles and elders of the Jewish congregation. We can call those Jewish believers Christians simply because the Bible does.
So we feel the same way here. We can take our stand on some of these things without compromise because we only have ONE that we're responsible to, and that's the Author of this Book. We handle this Book realizing what a tremendous responsibility it is. It doesn't matter whether we're a Sunday school teacher, or whether we're going to just hold a devotion in your woman’s group or whatever. Never forget that when we handle the Word of God that it's an awesome responsibility, and we never forget that. We do feel that Paul and Barnabas as they now come from Antioch and they're going to try to prove to the leadership at Jerusalem that you cannot add anything to the relationship between Christ and the believer except faith and faith alone as we all have to pass through a crisis to reach the place where we're in Christ's faith by way of death and abiding trust or faith in Paul's Gospel. And the revealing of these things by the Holy Spirit.
It might be said that in our day there are many who some how believe that the only reason for them to have received the Holy Spirit is for them to have the powers of Jesus and then to do the same works of Him but that is not so. The Holy Spirit is given us to train and teach us how to live by the Spirit, how to rightly divide or delineate the Living Word and How to read in the Spirit of the New the Old Testament to gain its hidden treasures. Then He's to train us in the school of obedience (the hidden purpose of the Old) because when we come into this world we're born in disobedience as son's of the devil. From which we are to be redeemed. Remember Jesus learned obedience from His youth and demonstrated it first at the river when He was baptized by John. Then the rest of His revealed life was in humble subjection to the full Will of God by the leading of the Holy Spirit who filled Him and rested upon Him. He did nothing on His own or in His own sufficiency. He is as Paul became our examples in learning and the teaching of the Holy Spirit for this one purpose to obedience and humility to the Will of God. The passage from death into the promised Everlasting Life and the workings of the Oath of God that He would do all both in us but also through us. For Him to do this requires our brokenness, surrender and a contrite heart of humiliation and receptivity of God's doing His works in us. We'll reveal more on this as we pass through this Epistle, watch for it.
Now we left off in verse 2, and we hope that we made the point that when he says-
Galatians 2:2a
"And I went up by revelation, and communicated..." In other words they didn't just flippantly say, "Well this is what we believe." But rather they sat down and they looked at it point by point. Line upon line, because these revelations that came through the Apostle Paul are so far above and beyond Judaism and the first covenant that it took some time for those people to understand where Paul was coming from. Those who remember back in Romans 1:16 where Paul says:
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