Paul's strong words in Galatians 1:8-9 were not the words of a man trying to win friends. His questions make that point. Whose approval is he after: people's or God's? The obvious answer is God's.

Barnes takes "persuade" here to mean winning someone's goodwill, to conciliate, so Paul is asking whose favor he is seeking. Gill instead takes "persuade" in the sense of to teach (Acts 18:4): whether Paul taught people to heed men or God. Barnes also suggests Paul may be answering a charge: it may have been said "that even he had changed his mind" and was now himself an observer of the laws of Moses. Barnes adds: "To this perhaps he replies, by this question." Matthew Henry says Paul's aim was "to bring persons to the obedience, not of men, but of God."

Paul answers at once: "for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ" (Galatians 1:10). He then explains why. The gospel he preached "is not after man" (Galatians 1:11), for he did not receive it from people but "by the revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12). The rest of the chapter traces how little contact he had with the other apostles in his early years (Galatians 1:15-19).

The word "servant" is doulos, a bondservant or slave. Paul is saying he belongs wholly to Christ as his Master.

Barnes notes that the word "yet" (eti) points back to Paul's past. Barnes says it "implies that this had once been his aim." Before his conversion Paul was "more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers" and advanced in the Jews' religion above many of his peers (Galatians 1:14). If he had kept living for that approval, Barnes says, he would not now be "a servant of Christ."

Paul's questions show that the gospel does not come from people and is not shaped to please them. It came "by the revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12). A messenger who changes the message to please the audience is no longer serving the One who sent it.

Gill makes a helpful distinction. There is a right way to please others, by proper means and to right ends, for the glory of God. But there is also a wrong way, "by dropping, concealing, or corrupting the doctrines of the Gospel, to gain the affection and applause of men." Paul refused the second. Barnes points to the same aim elsewhere in Paul's letters: "not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth our hearts" (1 Thessalonians 2:4).