“Let Him Be Accursed!”

Paul said it twice. He meant it both times.

Somewhere in Galatia, a room full of people are sitting on the floor waiting for a letter to be read.

They know how Paul's letters go. He always opens the same way — I thank my God in all my remembrance of you. Every church gets it. Corinth gets it, and Corinth was a hot mess.

They wait for it. It never comes.

What comes instead is this: "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel" (Galatians 1:6). And then twice, like a gavel coming down twice on the same bench:

"But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!" (Galatians 1:8-9)

What makes the apostle of grace talk like that?

He wasn't losing his temper. He was reading a verdict.

The word is anathema. In the old Greek world it meant something set up in a temple — a gift handed over, never coming back. When the Jews translated their Bible into Greek, that's the word they grabbed for the Hebrew cherem, the ban. It's the word hanging over Jericho. It's the word Achan reached into the tent and stole from.

A devoted thing. Turned over to God, and what God does with it after that is God's business.

So Paul isn't cussing anybody out. He's doing something a lot more sober. He's handing a man over to God for judgment and taking his own hands off him.

And notice he says it twice — as we have said before, so I say again. That's not heat. That's a signature on a document.

Notice also who is not exempt. Even if we. Paul puts himself in the line of fire. Or an angel from heaven. It doesn't matter who's holding the microphone. If the message is wrong, the message is wrong.

What they were doing to it

Paul's gospel fits on the back of your hand: "a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 2:16).

Faith in Jesus equals justified. That's the whole thing.

But teachers had come in behind Paul with a longer equation. Faith in

Jesus, plus circumcision, plus law-keeping, equals justified. And here's what you have to understand — that sounded better. More serious. More holy. Nobody sells you a lie by making it look cheap. They sell it to you by making it look expensive.

Paul's answer: "You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace" (Galatians 5:4).

You didn't improve the gospel. You lost it.

Now here's where I have to come home

Nobody is going to stop you in the church parking lot in 2026 and tell you that you need to get circumcised. That is not our temptation.

Ours runs the other direction. Not addition — subtraction. “Jesus plus nothing, nobody has to believe anything, everybody's already saved, see you at the banquet!”

They'll tell you it's the loving version. Let me show you where it was first preached.

"The serpent said to the woman, 'You surely will not die!" (Genesis 3:4)

The first universalist sermon in history was five words long and it was preached by a snake. And look at what it actually was. It wasn't an attack on God's love. It was an attack on God's honesty. Every version of it since does the same thing — it never calls God cruel, it just quietly calls Him a liar.

Because if everybody's in, then somebody has been badly overreacting for two thousand years.

Jesus was overreacting when He said the gate is small and the way is narrow and there are few who find it. He was overreacting when He said the one who does not believe has been judged already. Peter was overreacting when he stood in front of the men who could kill him and said there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.

Universalism doesn't just disagree with Paul. It has to shut Jesus up too. And a gospel that requires you to muzzle the Son of God to preach it isn't good news. It's garbage

"But Steve, you preach Jesus plus nothing"

I sure do. But hear me on the difference, because a man's eternity is at stake.

Nothing you can do gets added to what Jesus did. Not one thing. He finished it, He didn't need my help, and nothing I bring is going on that scale.

But somebody's got to take it. Read it slow:

"For by grace you have been saved through faith." Ephesians 2:8)

Through faith. That's a door, and you have to walk through it.

Now don't hear me wrong — faith isn't you chipping in. Faith is an open hand. It doesn't buy the gift, it just takes it. But a gift sitting on the table that nobody ever reaches for is still sitting on the table when the lights go out. And you better receive the gift before your lights go out. That’s a warning and a promise.

Grace is free. Grace is not automatic.

The verse that ought to sit down hard on all of us

"I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly." (Galatians 2:21)

Can you feel how that cuts both ways?

If I can earn it — Christ died needlessly.

If nobody has to receive it — Christ died needlessly.

One says the cross wasn't enough. The other says the cross wasn't necessary. One insults His work; the other insults His wounds. Either way there's a Man on a hill outside Jerusalem bleeding for nothing.

Think it through. If everybod'y's already saved, then every missionary grave on every continent is a monument to wasted effort. And Calvary was the most expensive unnecessary act in the history of the world.

That's not a wider gospel. That's an emptier one.

And don't let anybody tell you it's the nicer position. There's a man standing on the tracks and you can hear the train coming. Universalism walks up and tells him it's probably a rumour — and then calls itself compassionate for not upsetting him.

You cannot love a man into a heaven you've talked him out of needing.

A word for whoever's teaching it

Paul curses the teacher. He never curses the church. Three chapters later he's on the floor with the confused ones: "My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19). They were Christians. Paul didn't dispute that. They were on their way to heaven. They were in Christ. They just didn't have a whole lot of Christ in them — and a good part of the reason why is because of the preachers they were listening to. Because of who was feeding them. And that's who Paul went after. Not the sheep. The cook.

The warning is aimed at the pulpit. The plea is aimed at the pew. Severity toward the lie. Tenderness toward the people.

But the warning is real and I'd be a coward to soften it. Peter said false teachers would secretly introduce destructive heresies (2 Peter 2:1). Secretly. False gospels don't kick the door in. They get introduced. Somebody trims a line out of a sermon because it didn't sit well with the room. Somebody stops using the word lost. Somebody quits giving the invitation because it feels pushy.

Nobody announces a new gospel. They just quietly stop preaching the old one.

If that's you, hear me as a friend. Paul didn't say you were mistaken. He didn't say you were off on a secondary issue. He said, twice, in writing, with his name on it: let him be accursed.

That's not thin ice. That's a man out in the middle of the lake in April, hearing it crack under his boots, and preaching louder.

Come in off the ice. There's room at the true gospel, and there's forgiveness at it, and Paul of all people would know — he spent the first half of his life on the wrong side of it.

So what are you standing on?

Not what do you believe about the gospel. What are you standing on?

If there's something in your hands besides Jesus — a baptism, a bloodline, a good long stretch of clean living, a family name on a church roll — you're standing on something Paul would have handed over to God.

And if there's nothing in your hands at all — no faith, no surrender, just a quiet assumption that it all works out for everybody in the end — friend, you're not standing on grace. You're standing on nothing.

There's one place to stand.

Faith in Jesus. Nothing added. Nothing taken away. Nothing to improve.