Galatians 1:3-5: Rescued in the Same Age

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Galatians 1:3-5 (NIV)

Rescued in the Same Age

By eight the living room is down to boxes and a bare floor. A family is working through the last of it. The father holds up a bread machine, and his oldest shakes her head at it without looking twice. Everything that gets held up has to earn the truck.

Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ go to churches in Galatia that have turned to a different gospel almost as quickly as they were called. Paul is astonished at them and says so, and the greeting doesn’t shrink to match his mood.

Christ gave himself for our sins to rescue us out of the present evil age, and the will behind it was God our Father’s own. Those churches were standing in that age while the letter got read to them. The rescue out of it was finished before the argument in Galatia ever started.

Whoever first read this letter must have woken the next morning in the same town, with the same trouble in it, and Paul still called them rescued.

So take grace and peace as news about something already done, and ask God for peace on that ground. Let the age be exactly as bad as it is while you ask.

By ten the truck is fuller than the plan allowed for. The bread machine is on it and the table they measured twice for is not, and the father and his daughter both let that go without a word. There’s no room in the back for the lamp either, so the youngest rides the first mile of the move with it across her knees. She asks whether the new place has the same kind of sockets, and her father says he’ll find out when they get there. The move is done and she is still holding the lamp. That is the position Paul is writing to.