Galatians 4

Today’s Passage: Galatians 4

Paul has just told the Galatians that the law was a guardian put over Israel to lead her to Christ, and now he takes that picture up and turns it in his hands until you can see every side of it. He begins with a scene any household in the ancient world would have recognized on sight. A boy stands to inherit an entire estate. He is the owner of everything, and while he is still a child he touches none of it and orders nobody about, so that from the outside you could not tell him from the servants who wait on him. He is simply waiting for a date his father has already fixed. That, says Paul, is what we were: heirs in law and slaves in practice, fenced in under the elementary principles of the world. And then comes the sentence this whole letter has been climbing toward. The date arrived. God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law and to bring them in as sons; and then He sent the Spirit of that same Son into their hearts, and the cry that goes up out of a redeemed heart is Abba, Father. Slave, then son, then heir, in four short verses.

From that summit the chapter drops into something you would never expect from the man who wrote the anathema of chapter one. It turns personal, and almost broken. He remembers the illness that first brought him to Galatia and how tenderly they took him in. He asks what has become of their joy. He calls them his children and says he is in the pains of childbirth over them all over again. Then at the last he takes the oldest family story Israel had, Abraham with two sons by two women, and reads it as a picture of two covenants and two kinds of standing before God: slavery under law, or freedom by promise.

As you read, hold this: When the time had fully come God sent His Son to buy slaves out of the market and make them sons, and then sent the Spirit of that same Son into their hearts to cry Abba, Father.

Galatians 4:1–3 (BSB)

¹ What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he is the owner of everything. ² He is subject to guardians and trustees until the date set by his father. ³ So also, when we were children, we were enslaved under the basic principles of the world.

Watch the picture carefully, because Paul is not comparing a bad childhood to a good adulthood. The boy in verse one is the heir. He is not on probation and he is not an outsider hoping to be let in. He is the owner of everything, and yet, Paul says, he is at present “no different from a slave.” He eats what he is given, goes where he is taken, and has no authority over a single acre of the estate that bears his name. And there is no injustice in that. It is simply not yet the day. “He is subject to guardians and trustees until the date set by his father.” The father is not absent from this story. He is the one who fixed the date, and the whole arrangement of guardians and stewards is his doing, for the good of a son too young to hold what is his. Keep that in view, because it tells you how Paul wants you to think about the long centuries under the law. That era was not God losing control or changing His mind. It was a Father managing an estate until a date He had already set. Then verse three brings it home and lands hard: “when we were children, we were enslaved under the basic principles (στοιχεῖα) stoicheia, pronounced stoy-KHAY-ah. Strong's G4747, elementary principles, the basic elements. The word behind “basic principles” is stoicheia, and it is one of the genuinely debated words in the New Testament, so let us be honest about it. Its root meaning is a row or a series, and from there it came to mean the things that stand in a row at the bottom of any subject: the ABCs a child chants, the four elements the philosophers said the world was made of, the fundamentals you master before you go on. When Paul says we were enslaved under the stoicheia of the world, careful readers have taken him in three main ways. Some hear the ABCs of religion, the elementary stage of God’s schooling, rules and shadows suited to childhood. Some hear the physical elements and the calendar bound to them, sun and moon and season, and the whole business of ordering life by the sky. And some hear personal powers, spiritual beings the ancient world believed stood behind those elements, from whom Christ has set us free. The word can carry all three, and Paul may well have chosen it because it does. What is beyond dispute is the verb he attaches to it. Under these things we were enslaved. Whatever the stoicheia were, they were a nursery at best and a prison at worst, and no one ever became a son by mastering them. of the world.” Notice the we. Paul, a Hebrew of Hebrews, puts himself in the sentence alongside Gentile Galatians who had never seen a synagogue. Whatever else divided them, both had been minors, both had been under management, and neither had been free.

Galatians 4:4–7 (BSB)

⁴ But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, ⁵ to redeem those under the law, that we might receive our adoption as sons. ⁶ And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” ⁷ So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, you are also an heir through God.

Stop here. Read those four verses again slowly, and then a third time, because you have come to one of the highest places in Scripture and there is no hurrying across it. “But when the time had fully come.” The date the Father set in verse two did not slip and was not moved. It arrived, in the reign of a Roman emperor, on roads Rome had built, in a world speaking Greek and waiting without knowing what it waited for. “God sent His Son.” He was the Son before He was sent; the sending did not make Him one. And then seven words that hold the whole mystery of the incarnation without a syllable to spare: “born of a woman, born under the law.” Born of a woman, so He is truly one of us, flesh and blood, a nursing infant who had to learn to walk, a man who got tired and thirsty and wept. Born under the law, so He stepped inside the very system that held us, circumcised on the eighth day, kept every commandment we broke, and stood at last under the curse that was ours. Why? Verse five gives two purposes and they lock together: “to redeem those under the law, that we might receive our adoption as sons (υἱοθεσία) huiothesia, pronounced hwee-oh-the-SEE-ah. Strong's G5206, adoption as a son, the legal placing of a son as heir. Huiothesia is a compound word, huios for son and thesis for placing, so quite literally the placing of someone as a son. It appears only five times in the New Testament and every one of them is Paul’s, which suggests he reached for a term out of the Roman law courts on purpose. In Greek families adoption was known but comparatively rare; in Rome it was a familiar legal instrument, and its effects were total. The adopted man’s former life was legally closed. His debts died with his old standing, his new father’s name became his own, and his right of inheritance stood beside that of sons born in the house, indistinguishable in law. There is no probation in it, no lesser class of membership, no clause allowing the father to send him back. Now set that beside the man who first heard this letter read aloud in Galatia, a Gentile whom the whole religious world had told he was, at best, an outsider who might be permitted to come partway in. Paul tells him he is a son. Not a guest, not an associate, not a candidate. And by the same word he tells anyone reading this today that acceptance with God is not an achievement waiting on your improvement. It is a placing, done by the Father, at a cost you did not pay, and it is finished. .” Redemption is the price paid to get a slave out. Adoption is the standing given to the one who was bought. He did not purchase us and leave us in the yard as improved servants. He carried us into the house and gave us the family name.

Then comes something more intimate still, and notice the order of it, because everything depends on the order. “And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts.” The Spirit does not come to reward a sonship you have earned or to certify one you are still hoping for. He comes because it is already true. God sent the Son to make sons, and then sent the Spirit of that Son to make sons know it, and the sign of His presence is a cry: “ Abba, Father! (Ἀββᾶ) Abba, pronounced ab-BAH. Strong's G5, Abba, the Aramaic word for father. Abba is not Greek at all. It is Aramaic, the everyday household language of Galilee and Judea, and Paul leaves it untranslated in the middle of a Greek letter to Celts in the middle of Asia Minor, which tells you it had become precious in the churches exactly as it stood. It is the word a child used at home, warm and close, though it is worth saying plainly that the old claim that it simply means Daddy goes too far; grown sons and daughters used it of their fathers all their lives. It is the language of a real family, not of baby talk. Its deepest weight comes from where else it appears. In Gethsemane the Lord Jesus fell to the ground and prayed, and Mark keeps the Aramaic just as Paul does: “Abba, Father,” He said, “all things are possible for You. Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.” That is the cry Paul now says is rising in your heart, and it rises because the Spirit of the One who prayed it has been sent there. Understand what that means for the day when you cannot pray well, when the words are thin and the feelings are gone and you are not sure God hears. The cry is not first evidence of your sincerity. It is evidence of His Spirit. He put it there. ” That is not a doctrine recited. It is a voice out of the heart. And here is the wonder of it, the thing to sit with: the very Spirit who is the Spirit of the eternal Son, in whom that Son cried out to His Father in a garden at night, has been put inside ordinary people, so that the word on the Son’s lips is now on ours. Then verse seven draws the line under all of it, and it moves in three steps you should count on your fingers. “So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, you are also an heir through God.” Slave. Son. Heir. Not slave, then better slave, then trusted slave. The slavery is over, the sonship is given, and the inheritance follows the sonship as certainly as the sunrise follows the night, because it comes “through God” and not through us. Blessed be His name for a salvation built like that.

Galatians 4:8–11 (BSB)

⁸ Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. ⁹ But now that you know God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you are turning back to those weak and worthless principles? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? ¹⁰ You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! ¹¹ I fear for you, that my efforts for you may have been in vain.

Having lifted them to the height of sonship, Paul turns and asks the question that has been burning in him. Look first at how honestly he describes their past: “when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.” He does not flatter their old religion as a sincere search that God accepted. It was bondage to nothing. Then he describes their present, and catches himself mid-sentence in one of the loveliest corrections in all his letters. “But now that you know God,” he says, and then stops, as if that were still too much credit to leave with them, and adds, “or rather are known by God.” Which came first? Not your knowing. His. Before you ever turned your face toward Him He had set His eye on you, and your knowledge of God is only the answer to His knowledge of you. Then the question, and you can hear the disbelief in it: “how is it that you are turning back to those weak and worthless principles?” Weak, because they have no power to change a heart. Worthless, because they cannot pay a debt. And Paul is deliberately using the same word he used in verse three, so that the shocking equation cannot be missed. To take up the calendar as a means of standing with God is, at bottom, the same move their pagan neighbors made watching the sky, whatever the difference in the days chosen. “You are observing special days and months and seasons and years!” Be careful here, and do not turn this into a rule against gathering on the Lord’s Day or marking the seasons of Christ’s life with gladness. Paul is not attacking a calendar. He is attacking a calendar wheeled in to do what only the cross can do. And his fear is not that they will lose their sonship, for he has just said it rests on God’s sending and God’s Spirit. His fear is for his labor and for their peace: “I fear for you, that my efforts for you may have been in vain.”

Galatians 4:12–16 (BSB)

¹² I beg you, brothers, become like me, for I became like you. You have done me no wrong. ¹³ You know that it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you. ¹⁴ And although my illness was a trial to you, you did not despise or reject me. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus Himself. ¹⁵ What then has become of your blessing? For I can testify that, if it were possible, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. ¹⁶ Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?

Now the argument stops, and a man’s heart comes out. If your picture of Galatians is a furious apostle hurling anathemas, this paragraph will correct it, and you should let it. “I beg you, brothers.” The Greek behind that is a plea, not a command; the man who called down a curse on false teachers in chapter one is now pleading with the people those teachers deceived. Note the difference. He never confuses the wolves with the sheep. “Become like me, for I became like you,” which means: I am a Jew who laid down every advantage of the law to stand on Christ alone, so do not go picking up what I put down. And then, quickly, before they can hear an accusation in it, “You have done me no wrong.” He is not nursing an injury. Then the memories come. He first preached to them because of an illness, some weakness that stranded him on that plateau, and it must have been unpleasant to look at, since he says frankly that his condition was “a trial to you.” Yet they did not despise him. They took in a sick and unimpressive stranger “as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus Himself,” which is the highest thing that can be said of any welcome, and they would have given him their own eyes. “What then has become of your blessing?” There is the wound. Something has gone out of them, and Paul can feel it across the miles. Then the question that anyone who has ever told a friend the truth will recognize: “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” Nothing costs a friendship faster. And notice that Paul does not solve the problem by going quiet. He tells them the truth and takes the wound, because a man who loves you enough to risk your affection is worth more than a hundred who will only ever agree with you.

Galatians 4:17–20 (BSB)

¹⁷ Those people are zealous for you, but not in a good way. Instead, they want to isolate you from us, so that you may be zealous for them. ¹⁸ Nevertheless, it is good to be zealous if it serves a noble purpose—at any time, and not only when I am with you. ¹⁹ My children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, ²⁰ how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you.

Here Paul lays bare how the false teachers worked, and it is worth knowing, because the method has never gone out of use. “Those people are zealous for you.” They were attentive. They courted the Galatians, made much of them, took a flattering interest. But Paul names the aim under the warmth: “they want to isolate you from us, so that you may be zealous for them.” Shut the door, cut the other voices out, and the courted soul turns its zeal back on the courtier. Any teaching that has to isolate you before it can hold you is telling you something about itself. And see how carefully Paul refuses to sour on zeal as such: “Nevertheless, it is good to be zealous if it serves a noble purpose.” He is not asking for a cooler faith. He is asking for a fire lit at the right altar, burning steadily whether he is in the room or not. Then all restraint goes and the tenderest words in the letter arrive: “My children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth (ὠδίνω) ōdinō, pronounced oh-DEE-noh. Strong's G5605, to travail, to suffer birth pains. Ōdinō is the verb for going through labor, the hard birth pangs themselves, and there is no gentler reading of it available. What arrests you is who says it. A single man, an apostle, reaches past every other image he might have used and takes hold of the most exhausting and most costly work a human being does, and says: this is what I am doing over you, and I am doing it again, having already once brought you to birth. The prophets had used the same picture for the anguish of a nation under judgment, and Jesus used it of a woman whose sorrow turns to joy when the child is finally in her arms. Paul’s ache is aimed at that joy. And notice the goal one more time, because it defines what all real ministry is for: “until Christ is formed in you.” The word for formed is the one used for shaping something into its true shape. Not until they behave better, not until they join the right party, not until they are impressed with Paul. Until the likeness of the Lord Jesus takes shape in the inner life of ordinary people. That is worth labor pains. Anything less is not worth the name. until Christ is formed in you.” Do not miss what he is aiming at. Not that they would be persuaded, not that they would side with him against his opponents, but that Christ would be formed in them. That is the whole of pastoral labor in five words. And then a sentence that lets you see the man’s face: “how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you.” He knows the letter is severe. He would soften it if he could be there in person to say it with his eyes. He is not enjoying this. He is baffled and grieved and still writing.

Galatians 4:21–23 (BSB)

²¹ Tell me, you who want to be under the law, do you not understand what the law says? ²² For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. ²³ His son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born through the promise.

Paul turns now and meets his opponents on their own ground, and the opening question has a smile in it as well as a blade: “you who want to be under the law, do you not understand what the law says?” You are so eager for Moses. Very well, listen to Moses. And he goes to the story every one of them knew by heart. Abraham had two sons. Ishmael was born to Hagar the slave woman, and he was born “according to the flesh,” which in Genesis means exactly what it sounds like: an elderly couple, tired of waiting on a promise that showed no sign of arriving, arranged a child by ordinary human means through a servant. Isaac was born to Sarah the free woman, and he was born “through the promise,” which is to say he was impossible. Sarah was past childbearing and everyone in the tent knew it. The one boy was what human capability could produce when it stopped waiting on God. The other boy was what God produced when human capability had nothing left to offer. That is the whole distinction, and it is the distinction this letter has been making since chapter three. There is a religion of the flesh, which is what people can manage by effort and arrangement, and there is the way of promise, which is what God alone can do and which arrives when you have given up producing it. The men troubling Galatia would have counted themselves the children of Isaac beyond all question. Paul is about to ask them which birth their theology actually resembles.

Galatians 4:24–27 (BSB)

²⁴ These things serve as illustrations, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children into slavery: This is Hagar. ²⁵ Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present-day Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. ²⁶ But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. ²⁷ For it is written: “Rejoice, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth and cry aloud, you who have never travailed; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.”

This is the hardest paragraph in the letter, and honesty about that is the first duty of anyone who teaches it. Paul himself flags what he is doing: “These things serve as illustrations,” and the word underneath is the one from which we get allegory, a reading in which the parts of a story stand for something beyond themselves. He is not telling us that Genesis did not happen. He is saying that the shape of what happened carries a further meaning, and that he, as an apostle, is authorized to draw it out. Readers who love this passage divide over how far Paul means to press it. Some hold that he is doing what the Jewish teachers of his day did with a text, and beating his opponents at their own game. Others hold that he is reading the pattern God Himself built into the history, so that the two births were always a picture of the two ways men try to belong to God. It is fair to say the passage is difficult, and fair to say that neither reading changes his conclusion. The women stand for two covenants. Hagar, the slave, stands for Sinai, and the covenant of Sinai, taken as the road to acceptance with God, “bears children into slavery,” because a covenant of commandments can only ever produce servants who must perform. Sarah is not named here, but she stands opposite as the covenant of promise, and her city is “the Jerusalem above,” which “is free, and she is our mother.” Then Paul reaches for Isaiah’s word to a ruined and childless-looking people, and hear it as it stands in the prophet:

"“Shout for joy, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth in song and cry aloud, you who have never travailed; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband,” says the LORD." Isaiah 54:1 (BSB)

Sarah’s laughter is in that verse, and so is every barren hope God has ever filled. The woman with no children ends up with more than the woman who had every natural advantage, because God delights to give life where there was no possibility of it.

And now a warning that must be said plainly, because this passage has been terribly misused. Paul is not passing a verdict on the Jewish people. He is not saying that Jews are the children of Hagar and Christians the children of Sarah, and if you read him that way you have made him contradict himself twice over. He is himself a Jew, and elsewhere he writes of his own kinsmen, “I have deep sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my own flesh and blood,” which is not the language of a man writing off his nation. And the people he is actually arguing with here are not Jews as such, but teachers pressing Gentile believers to take up the law as the ground of their acceptance. The line Paul draws does not run between two ethnic groups. It runs between two ways of standing before God, and it runs straight through every congregation on earth, including the one you belong to. Any soul, Jewish or Gentile, who rests wholly on the promise of God in Christ is a child of the free woman. Any soul who rests on performance is at Sinai, and Sinai was never able to make a son.

Galatians 4:28–31 (BSB)

²⁸ Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. ²⁹ At that time, however, the son born by the flesh persecuted the son born by the Spirit. It is the same now. ³⁰ But what does the Scripture say? “Expel the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” ³¹ Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.

Paul turns the whole thing on its point and hands it to them: “Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise.” Uncircumcised Gentiles on a plateau in Asia Minor, told that they stand where Isaac stood, born not by anybody’s arrangement but by the word of God. Then a sober note. It went hard for Isaac in that household, and Genesis records that the older boy mocked the younger at the very feast held to celebrate him. “It is the same now,” Paul says, and the Galatians knew it; the pressure on them was not academic. Wherever the free grace of God is preached, those who are staking everything on their own performance find it intolerable, and it comes out as hostility. Do not be surprised by that, and do not answer it in kind. Then Paul quotes Sarah’s words, and it is worth seeing what he does with them. In Genesis, Sarah says to Abraham, “Expel the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac!” Paul keeps the command but changes the ending from my son Isaac to “the free woman’s son,” because the point is no longer one boy in one tent. It is a principle. Slavery and sonship cannot share an inheritance. You cannot have Sinai as your standing and Christ as your standing at the same time, any more than a man can be a slave and a son in the same house on the same day. One of them has to go, and Paul says it is not the sonship. So the chapter closes where it began, with a household and an inheritance, but now everything is settled: “Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.” Say it over yourself. Not slaves. Free.