Galatians 1:9

‘As we have said before, so now we say again. If any man preaches to you any Gospel other than that which you have received, let him be anathema.'

He repeats what he has said in a slightly different way. The double stress and double curse brings out how much his emotions are stirred. These men who had come preaching to the Galatians, and were wrongly stressing that they had the backing of the Jerusalem church, ‘unlike Paul' (or so they said), were bringing an emaciated message. Instead of seeking to bring the Galatians into the freedom of Christ they were trying to bring them into bondage to a set of religious and ethical observances. They were enmeshing them in ‘do this, do that, and don't do the other', until it was not clear to them what they really had to do. They were binding them with burdens grievous to be borne. And the sad thing was that these things that they were involving themselves in had in fact no power or ability to save them. They were simply man made requirements which gave an outward show of being religious, and substituted for the truth. They imparted a certain satisfaction because men hoped that they were achieving something, but in fact they were achieving nothing, for they left them just as they were before.

The Jerusalem church in fact took far longer to find release from the requirements of Judaism than the rest of the Christian world, for they were mainly Jewish Christians in a Jewish land witnessing to Jews, and they found it hard to let go of what had continually been their custom. And they were accustomed to it. It was part of their way of life. But Paul recognised that to tie Gentiles up in these things was totally inappropriate and was to put them under an unnecessary and cruel burden. Indeed it was anathema.