GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
GALATIANS 1:18
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18 Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and I stayed with him fifteen days.
A reader might pass right by the seemingly insignificant word “then” that begins this verse. But with it, Paul sets out a signpost, like a traffic cone in the road, that marks something important. “Then” (Greek epeita, ἔπειτα) shows a sequence of events in which one thing is intentionally set apart from the next, and so on. In this sequence, three “thens” divide Paul’s main points into four parts: (1) His time in Arabia, (2) then (1:18) a quick visit with Peter, (3) then (1:21) a trip to Syria and Cilisia, (4) then (2:1) he went up again to Jerusalem, fourteen years after his conversion.
Paul is making a theological point with this chronology. He was not turned into an apostle or a preacher by Peter and the other apostles of Jesus. He had already been preaching for years before he even met Peter, and his call was from Christ, not from any of the human leaders of the church. But Paul is open and honest about his time with the men he met in his visit to Jerusalem. One of these was Cephas, who is Peter. Paul went to Jerusalem especially to meet Peter.
The visit in Jerusalem was just for two weeks, or fifteen days, and this happened three years after his conversion. While some ancient commentators went to amazing lengths to find a spiritual significance to this number (seven plus eight, and so on), Paul is not resorting to numerology or gematria; he is simply counting days. To paraphrase King Lear, the reason Paul stayed for fifteen days was that he did not stay for sixteen.
The amount of time was not enough to be instructed in anything. “It is Paul’s purpose,” explains Luther, “to stop the mouths of false apostles, who had asserted– perhaps by using as proof the fact that he came to Peter– that he was taught by Peter, through whose example they had stirred up the Galatians to observe the Law.” The “example” from Peter that stirred up the Galatians will be described by Paul in Galatians 2:11-14. But since Paul only came to Jerusalem to meet Peter, and not to be taught or instructed by him, he proves the point by the amount of time, since two weeks would not have given Peter enough time to quickly carve out instructional hours for Paul in the middle of all his other duties as pastor to the church and as husband to his wife (1 Corinthians 9:5). So the fifteen days are important to us and for the Holy Spirit to communicate to us and to all Christians. But the fifteen days are not important on account of any mysterious or spiritual depth of the numeral fifteen, whether by itself, or as the sum of seven and eight or the product of three and five. The significance is only a matter of chronology, as when Jonah tells us that a trip through Nineveh required three days (Jonah 3:3), or when Esther says that thirty days went by without her being summoned by the king (Esther 4:11). There wasn’t enough time for Peter to instruct Paul.
We see another example of this in Paul’s ministry when he writes to the Thessalonians soon after he wrote this letter. Having spent only three Sabbath days with them, or around three weeks, he was driven out of Thessalonica by the Jews in their jealousy. But not daring to face Paul in their cowardice, they rounded up “some bad characters” from the marketplace and used them as a mob to try to drive Paul away (Acts 17:5). But Paul slipped out of town at night when the brutes couldn’t find him, and he walked down to Berea (Acts 17:10). Now, after spending more time with the Thessalonians than he had spent with Peter, Paul knows that he did not have nearly enough time to instruct them on many important matters, even though he did nothing else while in Thessalonica except teach. So he wrote them two epistles, warning about sexual immorality, impurity, laziness, and also about the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all mankind, about the punishment of hell, the coming of Antichrist, and other things. Therefore, if he, Paul, could not teach very much to the Thessalonians in three weeks even though he did nothing else while he was there, how could Peter teach him very much if anything in less time when he had other duties to perform? This is how the Holy Spirit uses something as trivial as a calendar to proclaim the purity and authority of the Gospel, and to drive home the point: Paul was taught the Gospel by Christ, not by Christ’s apostles, and not even by Peter himself. This was not to uncover or to root out any false doctrine in Peter’s preaching, but in the false teaching of the gospel-twisting Judaizers in Galatia. They were guilty of preaching against Paul and against Christ. And what of that? “Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God” (2 John 1:9). Their errors and their lies had to be exposed, so that the dear Christians in Galatia, whom Paul calls his brothers again and again, nine times in all, in six short chapters. Why are they brothers? Because brothers share together in the inheritance of their father, and we who are the brothers and sisters of Christ share in the inheritance of God the Father through faith in Christ, and we are grafted into the family of believers not on account of our own heroics or triumphant deeds, but by the grace of God as a gift, counting our faith as righteousness.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Galatians 1:18 Fifteen days