Galatians 2:18 Cross References

Galatians 2:18

18: Rather, I make myself guilty if I rebuild the old system I already tore down.

And now that you have found God (or should I say, now that God has found you), why do you want to go back again and become slaves once more to the weak and useless spiritual powers of this world?
You are trying to find favor with God by what you do or don't do on certain days or months or seasons or years.
I fear for you. I am afraid that all my hard work for you was worth nothing.
Dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to live as I do in freedom from these things, for I have become like you Gentiles were--free from the law. You did not mistreat me when I first preached to you.

So because of your superior knowledge, a weak Christian, for whom Christ died, will be destroyed.
And you are sinning against Christ when you sin against other Christians by encouraging them to do something they believe is wrong.

When he first arrived, he ate with the Gentile Christians, who don't bother with circumcision. But afterward, when some Jewish friends of James came, Peter wouldn't eat with the Gentiles anymore because he was afraid of what these legalists would say.
Then the other Jewish Christians followed Peter's hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was influenced to join them in their hypocrisy.
When I saw that they were not following the truth of the Good News, I said to Peter in front of all the others, "Since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a Gentile, why are you trying to make these Gentiles obey the Jewish laws you abandoned?
You and I are Jews by birth, not 'sinners' like the Gentiles.
And yet we Jewish Christians know that we become right with God, not by doing what the law commands, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be accepted by God because of our faith in Christ--and not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be saved by obeying the law."

Dear brothers and sisters, if I were still preaching that you must be circumcised--as some say I do--why would the Jews persecute me? The fact that I am still being persecuted proves that I am still preaching salvation through the cross of Christ alone.

Even that question wouldn't have come up except for some so-called Christians there--false ones, really--who came to spy on us and see our freedom in Christ Jesus. They wanted to force us, like slaves, to follow their Jewish regulations.
But we refused to listen to them for a single moment. We wanted to preserve the truth of the Good News for you.

And if another Christian is distressed by what you eat, you are not acting in love if you eat it. Don't let your eating ruin someone for whom Christ died.

I am not one of those who treats the grace of God as meaningless. For if we could be saved by keeping the law, then there was no need for Christ to die.

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