Galatians 3

Today’s Passage: Galatians 3

This is the chapter where Paul stops arguing from his own history and starts arguing from theirs. In chapter two he had told the story of Jerusalem and Antioch and finished with the words that hold the whole letter together, that he had been crucified with Christ and now lived by faith in the Son of God. Now he wheels around on his readers with a cry of astonishment. Someone has put a spell on these people. They had seen Christ crucified set before their eyes in the preaching, and they are now being persuaded that the finished work needs a little completing by them. So Paul asks a single question, and he says plainly that he wants only one answer: when the Spirit of God came upon you, how did He come? By works of the law, or by hearing with faith? The whole chapter unfolds from that one question. From their own experience Paul goes back to Abraham, who was counted righteous long before there was a law to keep, and who was promised that all nations would be blessed through him. Then to the law itself, which pronounces a curse on everyone who does not keep all of it, and to Christ, who took that curse into Himself on a tree. Then to a piece of plain reasoning about wills and covenants: a promise made and ratified cannot be revised four hundred and thirty years later by a document that says nothing about revising it. Then to the honest question that follows, why the law was given at all, and the answer that it was a guardian escorting a child to the place where faith would meet him. And at the end, when all the scaffolding is down, the chapter opens out into one of the greatest sentences Paul ever wrote about who you are in Christ.

As you read, hold this: The Spirit you received by hearing with faith settles the whole question: Christ bore the law’s curse in your place, and in Him you are Abraham’s heir, a son of God clothed with Christ.

Galatians 3:1–4 (BSB)

¹ O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. ² I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? ³ Are you so foolish? After starting in the Spirit, are you now finishing in the flesh? ⁴ Have you suffered so much for nothing, if it really was for nothing?

There is heat in that opening, and it is the heat of a man who loves them. He does not call them wicked. He calls them foolish, which is the word for a mind that has stopped being used, and then he asks who has put the spell on them, as though only enchantment could explain how people who had seen so clearly could now be squinting. And notice the reason he gives for his astonishment: “Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.” Paul had not given them a lecture. He had put up a public notice. The word he uses is the word for something placarded where the whole town can read it, and what was written on it was a crucified Christ, whole and sufficient, nothing left to add. How do you stand in front of that and then go looking for a supplement? Then he narrows the entire controversy down to one question, and he does it with a kind of weary courtesy: “I would like to learn just one thing from you.” One thing. Not a debate about circumcision, not a wrangle over food, not a comparison of teachers. Just this. When the Holy Spirit of God came and took up residence in you, how did He come? Was it wages you had earned by keeping the law, or was it a gift you received by hearing with faith (πίστις) pistis, pronounced PIS-tis. Strong's G4102, faith, trust, reliance on another. Pistis is the great word of this letter, and it is worth stripping away some of the fog that has gathered around the English word faith. It does not mean a feeling of religious warmth, and it does not mean believing things without evidence. In ordinary Greek it was a business word and a friendship word: the trustworthiness of a man who keeps his contracts, the confidence you place in someone you have found reliable, the good faith between two parties. Paul uses it here for something with no strength of its own at all. Faith is not a work that earns; it is the open hand that receives. Look at what he sets it against. Not sin, but “works of the law,” which is to say the very best a religious person can produce. That is the alternative he rules out. And notice that in verse two faith is joined to hearing, because faith always has an object outside itself. It is not confidence in your confidence. Somebody preached Christ crucified, the Galatians heard it, and they cast themselves on Him. The Spirit came. That is the whole transaction, and it is the same today. If you are trusting Christ this morning, you are not holding onto Him with a grip you must strengthen. You are resting your weight on One who holds you, and the resting is the faith. ? They both knew the answer. Every one of those Gentiles had received the Spirit before he had kept a single ordinance of Moses. And that answer, honestly given, ends the argument, because if God Himself began the work in you on the terms of grace, it is a strange thing to go on with it on the terms of merit. That is the force of verse three, and it is one of the most searching questions in the letter: “After starting in the Spirit, are you now finishing in the flesh?” Nobody sets out to do that on purpose. It happens by drift, by the quiet assumption that grace got us in and effort will keep us going. Verse four adds a sad note. They had suffered something for this gospel already. Was it all for nothing? And then Paul catches himself, unwilling to write them off, and adds, “if it really was for nothing.”

Galatians 3:5–9 (BSB)

⁵ Does God lavish His Spirit on you and work miracles among you because you practice the law, or because you hear and believe? ⁶ So also, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” ⁷ Understand, then, that those who have faith are sons of Abraham. ⁸ The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and foretold the gospel to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” ⁹ So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.

Paul presses the same question once more, and this time he puts it in the present tense. It is not only that God gave them the Spirit at the beginning. He is still doing it. He lavishes His Spirit on them and works among them, and on what terms is He doing that today? The answer has not changed since the day they believed. Then, having settled the matter from their own experience, Paul goes where his opponents least expected him to go. They had been telling the Galatians to become sons of Abraham by taking Abraham’s mark. Very well, says Paul, let us look at Abraham. And he reaches for the sentence in Genesis that reports the moment God counted the old man righteous, quoting it word for word.

"Abram believed the LORD, and it was credited to him as righteousness." Genesis 15:6 (BSB)

Sit with the timing of that, because the timing is the argument. When that verdict was pronounced over Abraham he had no law, for Sinai was four centuries away. He had not yet been circumcised; that comes two chapters later. He had no temple, no priesthood, no sacrifices of the covenant, no record of obedience to point to. He had a promise from God about a child he did not have and a sky full of stars, and he believed God, and God credited it to him as righteousness. The word means what it means in a ledger: it was written to his account. So the very father of the nation, the man the agitators were appealing to, received his standing before God exactly the way these uncircumcised Galatians had received theirs. Which means, Paul says, that “those who have faith are sons of Abraham.” Not sons by blood. Sons by likeness, sons by the same road in. And then he says something wonderful about the Scripture itself: it “foresaw” this and “foretold the gospel to Abraham.” God was not improvising a plan for Gentiles late in the day when the Jewish mission ran into trouble. In the very first word He spoke to Abraham He said that all nations would be blessed through him, and Paul calls that the gospel, preached in advance, two thousand years early. Every believing Gentile reading this page was in the mind of God on the day He called a man out of Ur. Give thanks for that. Your salvation is not an afterthought.

Galatians 3:10–14 (BSB)

¹⁰ All who rely on works of the law are under a curse. For it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” ¹¹ Now it is clear that no one is justified before God by the law, because, “The righteous will live by faith.” ¹² The law, however, is not based on faith; on the contrary, “The man who does these things will live by them.” ¹³ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” ¹⁴ He redeemed us in order that the blessing promised to Abraham would come to the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.

Now the ground drops away. The Galatians thought that taking up the law would move them from an uncertain position into a safe one. Paul tells them it moves them under a curse (κατάρα) katara, pronounced kah-TAH-rah. Strong's G2671, curse, a sentence pronounced against. Katara is a compound, the ordinary word for prayer with a preposition meaning down fastened to the front of it: a word spoken down against someone. In the pagan world it was a formula scratched on a lead tablet to bring ruin on an enemy, superstition and spite. In Scripture it is nothing of the kind. A curse is not magic and it is not bad luck. It is the settled and righteous sentence of God against sin, announced in advance so that no one is taken by surprise, and Israel had heard it read aloud and had answered Amen. That is what makes verse thirteen so staggering. Paul does not say Christ pitied us under the curse, or that He explained the curse away, or that God quietly decided to overlook what He had said. The sentence was carried out. It fell in full on a Man on a tree outside Jerusalem, and it fell there because He put Himself where we were standing. Notice too that Paul says He became a curse, not merely that He bore one, which is the same daring way of speaking he uses when he says Christ was made sin for us. There is no way to hold this doctrine at a distance. If the curse was real, then your rescue cost exactly what it looks like it cost. Never speak of the cross casually again. . And he does not soften the reason. The law never offered itself as a scale where your good deeds might outweigh your bad ones. It said, and Israel said Amen to it out loud on the slopes of Mount Ebal, that anyone who does not continue in everything written in it stands cursed. Everything. Continually. Not most of it, most of the time. So a man who chooses the law as his ground of standing has chosen a ground that requires flawless, unbroken obedience, and there has only ever been one Man who could stand there. Then Paul lays two verses of Scripture side by side to show that God had said this all along. Habakkuk, watching an empire march on his little country, was given the word that “the righteous will live by faith,” and Leviticus, laying down the terms of the law itself, says “The man who does these things will live by them.” Two different principles of life. One says live by trusting. The other says live by doing, all of it, or not at all. They cannot be spliced together, and Paul will not let anyone try.

And then verse thirteen, and there is nothing in Paul plainer than this. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” Read those last three words slowly and do not hurry away from them. Not for our benefit in some general and cloudy sense. In our place. The curse was real, it was pronounced by God’s own law, and it was aimed at us, and He stepped into its path and took it into Himself. The word for redeemed is the word for buying a slave out of the market, and the price is named in the same sentence. Paul then quotes the line from Deuteronomy that every Jew associated with an executed criminal’s body left hanging in the open:

"you must not leave the body on the tree overnight, but you must be sure to bury him that day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance." Deuteronomy 21:23 (BSB)

The agitators would have used that verse to prove that a crucified man could not possibly be the Messiah. Paul takes the same verse and turns it into the heart of the gospel. Yes, He hung on a tree. Yes, that is the very sign of the curse. That is the point. He was numbered among the cursed because the curse belonged to us and He would not leave it on us. Elsewhere Paul says it in the same key: “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” Two exchanges in one act. Our curse laid on Him, His righteousness credited to us. And look at what it purchases in verse fourteen, because it is exactly what the Galatians were being tempted to seek elsewhere: the blessing promised to Abraham flowing out at last to the Gentiles, and the promised Spirit received by faith. What the law could only pronounce over you, Christ has carried away.

Galatians 3:15–18 (BSB)

¹⁵ Brothers, let me put this in human terms. Even a human covenant, once it is ratified, cannot be canceled or amended. ¹⁶ The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say, “and to seeds,” meaning many, but “and to your seed,” meaning One, who is Christ. ¹⁷ What I mean is this: The law that came 430 years later does not revoke the covenant previously established by God, so as to nullify the promise. ¹⁸ For if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on a promise; but God freely granted it to Abraham through a promise.

Paul now steps down from Scripture to the law courts for a moment, and he says so: “let me put this in human terms.” Take any ordinary legal instrument, a will or a settlement, properly witnessed and sealed. Once it is ratified, a third party cannot come along afterward and add conditions to it. Everybody in Galatia understood that. Then he applies it. God made a covenant with Abraham and ratified it Himself. The law arrived four hundred and thirty years later, dated precisely by the length of Israel’s stay in Egypt. A document that arrives four centuries after the signing does not get to rewrite the terms. If the inheritance now depends on law-keeping, then it is no longer an inheritance at all but a wage, and the promise God made has been quietly cancelled. God does not work that way. He “freely granted it to Abraham through a promise,” and a promise is secured by the character of the One who made it, not by the performance of the one who received it.

In the middle of that argument sits verse sixteen, and it repays slow reading. Paul notices that the promise was spoken to Abraham and to his seed (σπέρμα) sperma, pronounced SPER-mah. Strong's G4690, seed, offspring, descendant. Sperma is the ordinary word for seed, the grain a farmer sows, and by an easy extension the seed of a man and so his descendants. Like our word offspring it usually works as a collective; you can speak of a man’s seed and mean a whole family tree. Paul is not ignorant of that, and he uses the word collectively himself only thirteen verses later when he tells the Galatians that they are Abraham’s seed. What he is doing in verse sixteen is pointing out that God chose a word that could be singular, and then spent two thousand years narrowing it down to One. There is a lovely thread here running all the way back to the garden, where the first promise of rescue spoke of the woman’s seed who would crush the serpent’s head. Ever since, Scripture has been following a single line through a shrinking gate. Abraham’s seed is Christ. And here is the payoff, and it is the sweetest turn in the chapter: if the whole inheritance belongs to Him alone, then it belongs to everyone who belongs to Him. Not by pedigree, not by paperwork, not by the knife. You are joined to the Heir, and so you are an heir. The narrowing was never to shut people out. It was to gather everything into one pair of hands so that those hands could open. , singular, and he says the singular matters: it means One, who is Christ. Now, Paul knew perfectly well that the Hebrew word is a collective, the way we say offspring or stock and mean a whole line of descendants. He is not playing a trick with grammar. He is reading Genesis the way the rest of Scripture reads it, watching how the promise keeps narrowing. Not all Abraham’s children, but Isaac. Not both of Isaac’s sons, but Jacob. Out of the twelve, Judah. Out of Judah, David. Out of David’s house, One. The line runs to a single Person, and everything promised to Abraham is deposited in Him. Which means the inheritance is not held by a nation or an institution but by Christ, and there is only one way anyone comes into it. You come into it by being in Him. That is where the chapter is heading, and it will land there in verse twenty-nine.

Galatians 3:19–25 (BSB)

¹⁹ Why then was the law given? It was added because of transgressions, until the arrival of the seed to whom the promise referred. It was administered through angels by a mediator. ²⁰ A mediator is unnecessary, however, for only one party; but God is one. ²¹ Is the law, then, opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come from the law. ²² But the Scripture pronounces all things confined by sin, so that by faith in Jesus Christ the promise might be given to those who believe. ²³ Before this faith came, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. ²⁴ So the law became our guardian to lead us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. ²⁵ Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

An honest reader is bound to ask the question at this point, and Paul asks it for us: why then was the law given? If it cannot justify anyone and it only pronounces a curse, what was the point of Sinai? His answer has three parts. First, it was “added because of transgressions,” which means it came in to make sin visible, to turn the vague sense that something is wrong with us into a written charge with our name on it. A crooked line looks passable until you lay a ruler beside it. Second, it was temporary by design: “until the arrival of the seed to whom the promise referred.” It had a term. Third, it came at a distance, “administered through angels by a mediator,” with Moses standing between God and the people and the mountain fenced off. Verse twenty is famously compressed, and faithful readers have understood it in more than one way, so let no one pretend it is simple. The likeliest sense fits the argument exactly: a mediator stands between two parties, and a two-party arrangement can fail if either side breaks it, which is precisely what happened at Sinai. But the promise to Abraham was not like that. God swore it alone while Abraham slept, and God is one, and a promise made by one Party who is faithful cannot fail.

Then Paul guards his own teaching from an obvious misuse. Is the law against the promises of God? “Certainly not!” It is the strongest denial he has. The law is holy, and it came from the same God. It simply was never given the power to make anyone alive. If it had been, righteousness really would have come that way, and Paul says so without flinching. Instead, Scripture “pronounces all things confined by sin,” and the image is a prison with the door shut on everyone alike, Jew and Gentile, moral and immoral, so that the only way out is a door opened from outside by faith in Jesus Christ. And that is where the household picture comes in. The law, Paul says, became our guardian (παιδαγωγός) paidagōgos, pronounced pie-dah-goh-GOSS. Strong's G3807, guardian, the household slave who escorted a boy to his lessons. The paidagōgos was not a schoolmaster, whatever older translations may suggest, and getting him wrong flattens the whole picture. He was a household slave, often an older and trusted one, put in charge of a boy from about the age of six until he came of age. He walked the child to his lessons through streets that were not always safe, carried his tablets and his lamp, sat with him, kept him from bad company, corrected his manners, and had the standing to discipline him. Greek and Roman writers speak of him with a mixture of gratitude and complaint, because he was strict and he was always there, and no boy in the ancient world thought of him as the destination. He was the road. He did not teach the lessons and he did not own the house and he had no share in the inheritance; he delivered the son to the one who did. That is what Paul says the law was doing all those centuries. It hemmed Israel in, made sin visible, kept the nation from wandering off into the surrounding darkness, and walked them to the door of Christ. So when Paul says we are no longer under a guardian, it is not a slight against the law. It is the honour due to a servant who completed his task. The child has arrived; the escort steps back. And notice what has changed and what has not: you are not turned loose to run wild in the street. You are handed to your Father. to lead us to Christ. Then verse twenty-five, quiet and enormous: “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.” Not because the guardian was cruel, and not because the child rebelled and ran off. Because he arrived. Because the escort finished the errand he was sent to run.

Galatians 3:26–29 (BSB)

²⁶ You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. ²⁷ For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.

Everything the chapter has been building comes out here into open country, and you should let it ring. “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” All. Not the circumcised among you, not the advanced among you, not the ones with the right ancestry. All of you, and by faith, and in Christ. In that world, to be called a son was to be named the heir, the one who carries the family name and receives the estate, and Paul hands that title to a room full of Gentile converts with no lineage at all. Then he tells them how it happened: everyone baptized into Christ has “clothed yourselves with Christ,” and the word is the plain word for putting on a garment. A Roman boy coming of age laid aside the clothes of childhood and put on the toga of a man, and the city looked at him differently from that day. So it is here, only the robe is a Person. When God looks at you He sees His Son wrapped around you. You do not stand before Him in the rags of your own record, adjusted and mended. You stand in Christ.

And then verse twenty-eight, which is one of the summits of the whole New Testament, and it must not be shrunk to fit anyone’s comfort. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Take the measure of what Paul just said, in the world he said it in. Those three pairs were the deepest divisions the ancient mind knew, and men thanked God out loud for landing on the right side of them. There was a well-known blessing in which a man gave thanks that he was not made a Gentile, a slave, or a woman, and the Greeks had their own version of the same sentiment, thanking fortune for being born human and not beast, Greek and not barbarian, man and not woman. Race, class, sex: the three walls of the ancient world, and Paul says that in Christ not one of them determines your standing before God. The Gentile is not a second-tier member. The slave who cannot even own his own body is a full heir of the universe. The woman is a son of God, and Paul chose that word deliberately, because son was the inheritance word, and he refuses to give her a lesser one. Every believer, without exception and without gradation, is equally justified, equally clothed with Christ, equally an heir. Not tolerated. Not admitted on sufferance around the edges. One. If that does not move you, read it again until it does, and then praise God, because there is no other religion on earth that has ever said it.

Be clear, too, about what Paul is talking about here, and then let it go and get back to the glory of it. He is speaking about standing and inheritance in Christ. He is not addressing the question of who serves as an elder or how a household is ordered, which the same apostle takes up in other letters with other words, and where Manna Praxis holds the pattern Scripture lays down for the eldership of the church. A verse about the ground of your acceptance before God cannot be turned into a ruling about the office of elder in either direction, and it does the verse no honour to conscript it for an argument it was never fighting. Paul is answering men who said a Gentile must become a Jew to be a real Christian, and his answer flattens every such requirement forever. That is the fight. Leave the verse in it, where it is magnificent. Then comes verse twenty-nine, and the chapter closes the circle it opened at Abraham: “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.” There is the whole argument in one line. You are not an heir because of your blood, your effort, your ceremony, or your record. You are an heir because you belong to the Heir.