BEWITCHED

BEWITCHED

“You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?” Gal. 3:1

Unlike most of his other epistles, Galatians includes no prayer requests from Paul, nor any commendations of the church and its ministry. Paul had preached the doctrines of salvation by grace and Christian liberty so clearly and effectively when he had first established these churches that it was hard for him to understand how they could so quickly and easily be led into false doctrine. If anything this is even a greater problem today than in Paul’s day. Professing Christians are being “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14), not only with legalism but also with evolutionism, emotionalism, libertinism, and many other unscriptural heresies. Many, like the Galatians, have been “bewitched” by clever persuasion into such deceptions. The Greek word for “bewitched” is used only this once in the New Testament, and does not necessarily refer to witchcraft as such. The connotation is “fascinated” or “deceived.”