Galatians 4

Division 3. (Galatians 4:1-31; Galatians 5:1-6.)The meaning of the Spirit of Adoption having come.

Galatians 4:1-20

Subdivision 1. (Galatians 4:1-20.)The Grace given.

1. The apostle, therefore, now naturally returns to what he has already spoken of as the manifest peculiar blessing of Christianity itself, the coming of the Spirit. “We are all the sons of God by faith in Christ Jesus;” but then there were children of God before Christianity. The children of God were not gathered together as such; the true children were not acknowledged as such; but they were there. Christ died, not for the nation of Israel only, but that He might gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. There were, then, children, even while they were scattered. There were children of God under the law, but as long as they were there, they differed nothing from servants.

There was no cry of “Abba, Father.” There was no Father openly acknowledging them. The children were just as much children. They were, in that sense, “lords of all.” Nevertheless, they differed nothing from servants as to their practical condition. They were “under tutors and governors,” for their own good, “until the time appointed of the Father.” Now this tutelage, as the apostle tells us, was yet a real bondage. The law was the elements of the world. It is, in fact, what enters into every system of natural religion that was ever in man’s mind.

It is the principle upon which the whole world goes on, which is necessary to it, and man can conceive no other; but, by that very fact, it was bondage to the child of God. He was under that which denied him the nearness which was truly his own and prevented his serving in the liberty of the child’s place. 2. But the “fulness of time” came. God had steadfastly in view the Object which was before Him and He could not delay longer than necessity demanded. “When the fulness of the time” then “was come, God sent forth His Son,” the One in whom there was necessarily, by what He was, the greatest possible nearness to Himself, yet now apparently at a distance, “come of a woman” and actually Man, but “come under the law” also, under that which to every other was bondage, which for Himself could be none. With Him there was no impossibility of working out the righteousness of the law. It could only testify to the perfection that was in Him, and thus, after His thirty years of probation, the Spirit of God comes openly upon Him, marking Him out as the Object of God’s fullest delight. He was sealed, as we are not, because of His own perfection; but He entered, in that very act, upon a course of ministry to others in which redemption would be accomplished for those under the law, that now “we might receive the adoption of sons”; that is, the full place of children, as well as the reality of being such. 3. For this is what sonship means, in contrast with children, as the terms are used here. The child (teknon) is the one by nature that. He is born to it, and if born he can never cease to be the child of the one of whom he is born; but he may not have the place of child, and that is what in Scripture, “sonship” implies. The son (huios) is the acknowledged child, the child in the child’s place; and that is what is proper to Christianity. Children there were before it, but now they are “sons”; and we have received, in that way, the adoption.

The consequence is: “Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father.” Notice that the place as given of God must be ours first, then comes the qualification for the place, the Spirit of His Son. How wonderfully does that speak! It is not the spirit of a son simply, but the Spirit of His Son. In fact, it is the perfection of Christ which has rendered possible this reception by us of the Spirit of Christ, and which, therefore, brings us into the sweetness of the assurance of what Christ Himself is to God, in the value of which we abide. How then, asks the apostle as it were, is it possible, in such a place, to be a servant any longer, that is, a slave? It is the bondage of slavery of which he is speaking.

Servants, of course, we are in a true sense, by the very fact that we are sons. We serve as such. God has title to service, surely, from all His sons, but there is no bondage in this. If sons, we are gloriously free, and if sons, we are heirs of God through Christ. This, then, is the characteristic of Christianity. 4. The apostle turns now, therefore, to the Galatians, to appeal to them as to their lapse from such conscious blessedness. The going into Judaism is for him much the same thing as going back to the heathenism out of which, in fact, they had been brought. They had not known God, and then were doing service to those who by nature were no gods. Now they had known Him, or rather He had known them. Known and recognized, how could they turn to “the weak and beggarly elements of the world” whereunto they desired again to be in bondage? It was heathenism in which, in fact, they had been. These “elements of the world” for them had been in heathenism, and yet he says “How turn ye again?” It was all the same thing, in fact; if Christ were given up, what did it matter?

They were observing days and months and times and years. Nothing very dreadful, people would say, in that; but he immediately comments upon it: “I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain.” Then he beseeches them that they should be still as he himself continued to be; their lapse could not injure him in one sense. They knew how, in spite of infirmity of the flesh, he had preached the gospel to them at the first. They had not taken offence at the weakness, the physical weakness that they saw in him; they had not rejected him on account of that, which, in fact, was only designed to make the power of the Spirit in him more apparent. They had received him as an angel of God, even as the Christ he represented. Had they then, in fact, known that blessedness of which they had certainly spoken?

They would have plucked out their own eyes and have given them to him. How was it now?

Did telling them the truth make him their enemy? But there were others who were manifesting great zeal in their behalf, not in a right way. They were acting, as he puts it, for a purpose, -would exclude the apostle, that they might have themselves that place in their affections which they had robbed him of; but if they had really found the blessing which they declared, would it not be good for them to abide in that, to show their zeal after that manner? In fact, he was full of longing after them. He had been the one who had brought them into this blessing in Christ. Now he was travailing in birth again, as it were, (had all the sorrow and pain of that), until Christ should be formed in them.

He desired to be present with them, yet with a changed voice. He had had to change it, for he stood in doubt of them.

Galatians 4:21-5

Subdivision 2 (Galatians 4:21-31; Galatians 5:1-6.)The testimony of the law itself.

1. If they would not listen any more to the gospel or to the one who had spoken to them for Christ, the apostle would appeal now to the very law itself, which undoubtedly they must hear. Zealous law-keepers must hear the law. Here he goes back to Abraham again, and in a manner which, to some who scarcely fully accept the typical character of Old Testament history, would appear strange. Yet to “foolish Galatians” he can use this without questioning their ability to realize, not only the likeness to truth, but the truth itself that is in it. In fact, these typical pictures speak for themselves and are designed to speak.

When once we have the key to them, their perfect agreement with the truth can be nothing else than that designed of God to set it forth. Abraham’s two sons thus naturally speak of those two classes of his offspring of which the apostle has been speaking.

There is the seed after the flesh; there is the seed after the Spirit, the natural child “and the spiritual child,” the child “of faith.” It is not hard, therefore, to understand the similitude when he emphasizes the one seed as that by a bondmaid, the other by a free woman. Bondage and freedom have been his theme already. How fully plain does it become when he tells us that he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh, in the ordinary course of nature, with nothing necessarily of God in it, and on the other hand he of the free woman was by promise. He has already spoken of this promise, has already connected its “in thee,” said of him whose faith was reckoned to him for righteousness, with the faith of those who are the children of promise. These things, he says, not, “are an allegory,” exactly, but “are allegorized.” They were true things, things which had actually taken place, no question, but which nevertheless had “happened to them,” as the apostle says of other things in their history, “for types.” They had a divinely intended meaning in them and not merely could be used to show forth such things. These two, then, are the two covenants, the one from the Mount Sinai, the law bringing forth to bondage, which is Hagar; the other, that of promise “Jerusalem which is above,” “which is the mother of us all,” or “which is our mother.” “Jerusalem which is above” naturally carries our thoughts on to that of which John gives us in his Revelation by and by a fuller view.

It was the home city, the city of which all the people of God now are children. The apostle speaks of it as having a present reality and a place which faith indeed alone can recognize, but which is none the less real.

Paul turns to the prophet here, in order to show us that while, in fact, the barren was not bearing (before the time of Israel’s real travailing and birth, as in a day to come,) there would be, nevertheless, the strange paradox of many more children to her than when she had an husband. This is language which the apostle’s word about the olive-tree in the epistle to the Romans should enable us clearly to understand. The branches are broken off, but yet there are branches in their place which are counted as part of the olive-tree itself. They are, in fact, in a true sense, the fruit of Israel, although Israel has in the meantime lost that fruitful condition, and here we find the children which, in fact, should more rejoice her heart, when looking at things from the divine point of view, than all the generations of the nation in the flesh merely. Here, of course, are the children of promise. Here is the true Isaac, but the opposition between the one born after the flesh and this new spiritual birth is manifest.

This very apostle is proof of it even now, but the known opposition everywhere manifest on the part of Israel to Christ and to His people was, of course, the greatest proof. Israel after the flesh was persecuting the children of promise, but what would be the result?

The casting out of the bondwoman and her son. God had, in fact, disclaimed the principle of the law, which was the principle of bondage, and if He had now sons that were really of the free woman, children of promise, children that divine grace had made such, there could not be a common recognition of these and of those so totally opposite. “We then,” he says, “brethren, are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.” The law could easily, as it were, and naturally, bring forth children to God. How natural it is for men to accept a system of this sort and to be put upon such terms with God. The whole nation of Israel at once and decisively took this ground without a question. On the other hand, the true seed desired of God must be all born by divine power; born slowly, as one may think, long years passing while they seem to be only scanty in number and slow enough to mature, yet, after all, God will have His own. Scorn as Israel might those who now were being by the Spirit of God led to Christ and Christianity, Israel’s casting out was already manifestly at hand, when the very place of their holy house would be dug up by the Roman people and the worship ordained of God for the people in the flesh would no longer be possible to them.

Their house was left to them desolate. It was their house, not God’s, but that was the sentence upon it.

It would soon be not even their house any longer. 2. The apostle closes with the exhortation to “stand fast therefore in the liberty with which Christ hath made us free” and not to be “entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” He is very strong that there could be no profit of Christ to those who put themselves under the law. If they were circumcised, Christ would profit them nothing. A circumcised man was a debtor to do the whole law. This may seem strange from one who, as we know, before this time had himself circumcised Timothy, but the circumstances were entirely different. Timothy was a Jew by his mother’s side, and it was, in that case, such a concession on the part of one not under the law putting himself under it in the very liberty that he had to gain others, as made it a sign, therefore, of liberty instead of bondage.

With the Galatians it would be entirely different. They, as Gentiles, were not debtors to the law in any way, and if they put themselves under it, it was to gain from it a spiritual blessing; it was a real addition, therefore, to Christ that they were making, but by this, as we have already seen, they would be “fallen from grace,” for grace cannot admit the conditional principle of law without losing all its character. Again, we see also that he has no thought of any one taking up the law as a rule of life simply; it is of justification by it that he speaks, and this was in fact the only question that the law raised; but as Christians in possession of the Spirit, which we have seen to be the sign of their Christianity, they were outside the law, and necessarily in possession of a righteousness which the Spirit of God could seal, a righteousness perfect before God. They only waited in faith for the hope which was connected with this; not for righteousness as a hope, but for the hope of glory attaching to it. Thus, they were beyond any possible need of law; and “in Christ,” as he declares, “neither circumcision” availed “anything, nor uncircumcision.” A man was quite outside both the Jewish and the Gentile acceptance. God accepted nothing, except as faith, which, as the sign of dependence, drew blessing from Him; and which, in its nature, worked not by the principle of fear, which was that of law, but by love.