THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS.
BY THE REV. PROFESSOR,
G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.,
Headingley College, Leeds.
NEW YORK:
A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON,
51 East Tenth Street, near Broadway.
1893.
"Paul, an apostle (not from men, neither through man, but through
Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead),
and all the brethren which are with me, unto the Churches of Galatia." The text used in this exposition is, with very few exceptions, that
of the Revised English Version, or its margin.
The historical criticism of the present century has
brought this writing once more to the front of the
conflict of faith. Born in controversy, it seems inevitably
to be born for controversy. Its interpretation
forms the pivot of the most thoroughgoing recent discussions
touching the beginnings of Christian history
and the authenticity of the New Testament record.
The Galatian Epistle is, in fact, the key of New Testament
Apologetics. Round it the Roman and Corinthian
Letters group themselves, forming together a solid,
impregnable quaternion, and supplying a fixed starting-point
and an indubitable test for the examination of the
critical questions belonging to the Apostolic age. Whatever
else may be disputed, it is agreed that there was
an apostle Paul, who wrote these four Epistles to certain
Christian societies gathered out of heathenism, communities
numerous, widely scattered, and containing
men of advanced intelligence; and this within thirty
years of the death of Jesus Christ. Every critic must
reckon with this fact. The most sceptical criticism
makes a respectful pause before our Epistle. Hopeless
of destroying its testimony, Rationalism treats it with
an even exaggerated deference; and seeks to extract
evidence from it against its companion witnesses amongst
the New Testament writings. This attempt, however
misdirected, is a signal tribute to the importance of the
document, and to the force with which the personality
of the writer and the conditions of the time have
Of the four major Epistles, this one is superlatively characteristic of its author. It is Paulinissima Paulinarum—most Pauline of Pauline things. It is largely autobiographical; hence its peculiar value. Reading it, we watch history in the making. We trace the rise of the new religion in the typical man of the epoch. The master-builder of the Apostolic Church stands before us, at the crisis of his work. He lets us look into his heart, and learn the secret of his power. We come to know the Apostle Paul as we know scarcely any other of the world's great minds. We find in him a man of the highest intellectual and spiritual powers, equally great in passion and in action, as a thinker and a leader of men. But at every step of our acquaintance the Apostle points us beyond himself; he says, "It is not I: it is Christ that lives in me." If this Epistle teaches us the greatness of Paul, it teaches us all the more the Divine greatness of Jesus Christ, before whom that kingly intellect and passionate heart bowed in absolute devotion.
The situation which the Epistle reveals and the
personal references in which it abounds are full of
interest at every point. They furnish quite essential
data to the historian of the Early Church. We could
wish that the Apostle, telling us so much, had told us
The personal and the doctrinal element are equally
prominent in this Epistle; and appear in a combination
characteristic of the writer. Paul's theology is the
theology of experience. "It pleased God," he says,
"to reveal His Son in me" (ch. i. 16). His teaching
is cast in a psychological mould. It is largely a record
of the Apostle's spiritual history; it is the expression
of a living, inward process—a personal appropriation
of Christ, and a growing realization of the fulness of
the Godhead in Him. The doctrine of Paul was as far
as possible removed from being the result of abstract
deduction, or any mere combination of data externally
The Apostle's influence over the minds of others was
due in great part to the extraordinary force with which
he apprehended the facts of his own spiritual nature.
Through the depth and intensity of his personal experience
he touched the experience of his fellows, he
seized on those universal truths that are latent in the
consciousness of mankind, "by manifestation of the
truth commending himself to every man's conscience
in the sight of God." But this knowledge of the things
The features of Paul's style show themselves here in
their most pronounced form. "The style is the man."
And the whole man is in this letter. Other Epistles
bring into relief this or that quality of the Apostle's
disposition and of his manner as a writer; here all are
present. The subtlety and trenchant vigour of Pauline
dialectic are nowhere more conspicuous than in the
discussion with Peter in ch. ii. The discourse on
Promise and Law in ch. iii. is a master-piece of
exposition, unsurpassed in its keenness of insight,
breadth of view, and skill of application. Such passages
as ch. i. 15, 16; ii. 19, 20; vi. 14, take us into the
heart of the Apostle's teaching, and reveal its mystical
depth of intuition. Behind the masterful dialectician
we find the spiritual seer, the man of contemplation,
whose fellowship is with the eternal and unseen. And
the emotional temperament of the writer has left its
impress on this Epistle not less distinctly than his
mental and spiritual gifts. The denunciations of ch. i.
6-10; ii. 4, 5; iv. 9; v. 7-12; vi. 12-14, burn
In its construction the Epistle exhibits an almost
dramatic character. It is full of action and animation.
There is a gradual unfolding of the subject, and a skilful
combination of scene and incident brought to bear
on the solution of the crucial question. The Apostle
The above analysis may be reduced to the common threefold division, followed in this exposition:—viz. (1) Personal History, ch. i. 11-ii. 21; (2) Doctrinal Polemic, ch. iii. 1-v. 12; (3) Ethical Application, ch. v. 13-vi. 10.
The epistolary Introduction forms the Prologue, ch. i. 1-10; and an Epilogue is appended, by way of renewed warning and protestation, followed by the concluding signature and benediction,—ch. vi. 11-18.
The Address occupies the first two verses of the Epistle.
I. On the one side is the writer: "Paul, an Apostle." In his earliest Letters (to Thessalonica) the title is wanting; so also in Philippians and Philemon. The last instance explains the other two. To the Macedonian Churches Paul writes more in the style of friendship than authority: "for love's sake he rather entreats." With the Galatians it is different. He proceeds to define his apostleship in terms that should leave no possible doubt respecting its character and rights: "not from men," he adds, "nor through man; but through Jesus Christ, and God the Father, that raised Him from the dead."
This reads like a contradiction of some statement
made by Paul's opposers. Had they insinuated that
he was "an apostle from men," that his office was
The word apostle had a certain latitude of meaning. Compare
In the earlier period of his ministry, the Apostle was
seemingly content to rank in public estimation with his
companions in the Gentile mission. But a time came
when he was compelled to arrogate to himself the
"Not from men" excludes human derivation; "not
through man," human intervention in the conferment
of Paul's office. The singular number (man) replaces
the plural in the latter phrase, because it stands
immediately opposed to "Jesus Christ" (a striking
witness this to His Divinity). The second clause
carries the negation farther than the first; for a call
from God may be, and commonly is, imposed by
human hands. There are, says Jerome, four kinds of
Christian ministers: first, those sent neither from men
nor through man, like the prophets of old time and the
Apostles; secondly, those who are from God, but
through man, as it is with their legitimate successors;
thirdly, those who are from men, but not from God, as
when one is ordained through mere human favour and
flattery; the fourth class consists of such as have their
call neither from God nor man, but wholly from themselves,
as with false prophets and the false apostles
The call of the Apostle proceeded also from "God
the Father, who raised Jesus Christ from the dead."
Christ was in this act the mediator, declaring the
Supreme will. In other places, more briefly, he styles
himself "Apostle by the will of God." His appointment
took place by a Divine intervention, in which
the ordinary sequence of events was broken through.
Long after the Saviour in His bodily presence had
ascended to heaven, when in the order of nature it was
impossible that another Apostle should be elected, and
when the administration of His Church had been for
several years carried on by human hands, He appeared
once more on earth for the purpose of making this man
But why does he say, who raised Him from the dead? Because it was the risen Jesus that he saw, and that he was conscious of seeing in the moment of the vision. The revelation that arrested him before Damascus, in the same moment convinced him that Jesus was risen, and that he himself was called to be His servant. These two convictions were inseparably linked in Paul's recollections. As surely as God the Father had raised His Son Jesus from the dead and given Him glory, so surely had the glorified Jesus revealed Himself to Saul his persecutor to make him His Apostle. He was, not less truly than Peter or John, a witness of His resurrection. The message of the Resurrection was the burden of the Apostleship.
He adds, "and all the brethren which are with me."
For it was Paul's custom to associate with himself in
these official letters his fellow-labourers, present at the
time. From this expression we gather that he was
attended just now by a considerable band of companions,
such as we find enumerated in
II. Of the readers, "the churches of Galatia," it is
not necessary to say much at present. The character
of the Galatians, and the condition of their Churches,
will speak for themselves as we proceed. Galatian is
equivalent to Gaul, or Kelt. This people was a detached
fragment of the great Western-European race, which
forms the basis of our own Irish and West-British
populations, as well as of the French nationality.
They had conquered for themselves a home in the
north of Asia Minor during the Gaulish invasion that
poured over South-eastern Europe and into the Asiatic
peninsula some three and a half centuries before.
Here the Gallic intruders stubbornly held their ground;
and only succumbed to the irresistible power of Rome.
Defeated by the Consul Manlius in 189 B.C., the
Galatians retained their autonomy, under the rule of
native princes, until in the year 25 B.C., on the death
of Amyntas, the country was made a province of the
Empire. The people maintained their distinctive
The Roman Government had annexed to Galatia
certain districts lying to the south, in which were
situated most of the cities visited by Paul and Barnabas
in their first missionary tour. This has led some
scholars to surmise that Paul's "Galatians" were really
Pisidians and Lycaonians, the people of Derbe, Lystra,
and Pisidian Antioch. But this is improbable. The
inhabitants of these regions were never called Galatians
in common speech; and Luke distinguishes "the
Galatic country" quite clearly from its southern borderlands.
Besides, the Epistle contains no allusions, such
as we should expect in the case supposed, to the
Apostle's earlier and memorable associations with these
cities of the South. Elsewhere he mentions them by
name (
The Acts of the Apostles relates nothing of Paul's
sojourn in Galatia, beyond the fact that he twice
"passed through the Galatic country" (
No city is mentioned in the address, but the country of Galatia only—the single example of the kind in Paul's Epistles. The Galatians were countryfolk rather than townsfolk. And the Church seems to have spread over the district at large, without gathering itself into any one centre, such as the Apostle had occupied in other parts of his Gentile field.
Still more significant is the curtness of this designation. Paul does not say, "To the Churches of God in Galatia," or "to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ," as in other Epistles. He is in no mood for compliments. These Galatians are, he fears, "removing from God who had called them" (ver. 6). He stands in doubt of them. It is a question whether they are now, or will long continue, "Churches of God" at all. He would gladly commend them if he could; but he must instead begin with reproaches. And yet we shall find that, as the Apostle proceeds, his sternness gradually relaxes. He remembers that these "foolish Galatians" are his "children," once ardently attached to him (ch. iv. 12-20). His heart yearns towards them; he travails over them in birth again. Surely they will not forsake him, and renounce the gospel of whose blessings they had enjoyed so rich an experience (ch. iii. 3; v. 10). He calls them "brethren" once and again; and with this kindly word, holding out the hand of forgiveness, he concludes the letter.
"Grace to you and peace from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us out of this present evil world, according to the will of our God and Father: to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen."—Gal. i. 3-5.
This formula appears to be of the Apostle's coining. Other writers, we may believe, borrowed it from him. Grace represents the common Greek salutation,—joy to you, χαίρειν changing to the kindred χάρις; while the more religious peace of the Hebrew, so often heard from the lips of Jesus, remains unaltered, only receiving from the New Covenant a tenderer significance. It is as though East and West, the old world and the new, met here and joined their voices to bless the Church and people of Jesus Christ.
Grace is the sum of all blessing bestowed by God;
What could a pastor wish better for his people, or friend for the friend he loves most, than this double blessing? Paul's letters are perfumed with its fragrance. Open them where you will, they are breathing out, "Grace to you and peace." Paul has hard things to write in this Epistle, sorrowful complaints to make, grievous errors to correct; but still with "Grace and peace" he begins, and with "Peace and grace" he will end! And so this stern and reproachful letter to these "foolish Galatians" is all embalmed and folded up in grace and peace. That is the way to "be angry and sin not." So mercy rejoices over judgement.
These two benedictions, we must remember, go
together. Peace comes through grace. The proud
heart never knows peace; it will not yield to God the
glory of His grace. It scorns to be a debtor, even to
Him. The proud man stands upon his rights, upon his
merits. And he will have them; for God is just. But
peace is not amongst them. No sinful child of man
deserves that. Is there wrong between your soul and
God, iniquity hidden in the heart? Till that wrong is
confessed, till you submit to the Almighty and your
spirit bows at the Redeemer's cross, what hast thou
But while Paul gives this salutation to all his
Churches, his greeting is extended and qualified here in
a peculiar manner. The Galatians were falling away
from faith in Christ to Jewish ritualism. He does not
therefore wish them "Grace and peace" in a general
way, or as objects to be sought from any quarter
or by any means that they might choose; but only
"from God our Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, who
gave Himself for our sins." Here is already a note
of warning and a tacit contradiction of much that they
were tempted to believe. It would have been a mockery
for the Apostle to desire for these fickle Galatians
grace and peace on other terms. As at Corinth, so in
Galatia, he is "determined to know nothing save Jesus
Christ and Him crucified." Above the puerilities of
their Jewish ritual, above the pettiness of their wrangling
Do we not need to be recalled to the same sight? We live in a distracted and distracting age. Even without positive unbelief, the cross is too frequently thrust out of view by the hurry and press of modern life. Nay, in the Church itself is it not in danger of being practically set on one side, amidst the throng of competing interests which solicit, and many of them justly solicit, our attention? We visit Calvary too seldom. We do not haunt in our thoughts the sacred spot, and linger on this theme, as the old saints did. We fail to attain "the fellowship of Christ's sufferings;" and while the cross is outwardly exalted, its inward meaning is perhaps but faintly realised. "Tell us something new," they say; "that story of the cross, that evangelical doctrine of yours we have heard it so often, we know it all so well!" If men are saying this, if the cross of Christ is made of none effect, its message staled by repetition, we must be strangely at fault either in the hearing or the telling. Ah, if we knew the cross of Christ, it would crucify us; it would possess our being. Its supremacy can never be taken from it. That cross is still the centre of the world's hope, the pillar of salvation. Let the Church lose her hold of it, and she loses everything. She has no longer any reason to exist.
I. So the Apostle's greeting invites his readers to contemplate anew the Divine gift bestowed upon sinful men. It invokes blessing upon them "from our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins."
To see this gift in its greatness, let us go a little
farther back; let us consider who the Christ is that
But now, to crown all, He gave Himself! "The Word became flesh." The Son of God planted Himself into the stock of human life, made Himself over to mankind; He became the Son of man. So in the fulness of time came the fulness of blessing. Earlier bestowments were instalments and prophecies of this; later gifts are its outcome and its application. What could He have done more than this? What could the Infinite God do more, even for the most worthy, than He has done for us in "sending His Son, the Only-begotten, that we might live through Him!" Giving us Him, surely He will give us grace and peace.
And if our Lord Jesus Christ "gave Himself," is not that sufficient? What could Jewish ritual and circumcision add to this "fulness of the Godhead?" Why hunt after the shadows, when one has the substance? Such were the questions which the Apostle has to ask his Judaizing readers. And what, pray, do we want with modern Ritualism, and its scenic apparatus, and its priestly offices? Are these things designed to eke out the insufficiency of Christ? Will they recommend Him better than His own gospel and the pure influence of His Spirit avail to do in these latter days? Or has modern thought, to be sure, and the progress of the 19th century carried us beyond Jesus Christ, and created spiritual wants for which He has no supply? Paul at least had no anticipation of this failure. All the need of hungry human hearts and searching minds and sorrowing spirits, to the world's latest ages, the God of Paul, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is able to supply in Him. "We are complete in Him,"—if we but knew our completeness. The most advanced thinkers of the age will still find Jesus Christ in advance of them. Those who draw the most largely from His fulness, leave its depths unsounded. There are resources stored for the times to come in the revelation of Christ, which our age is too slight, too hasty of thought, to comprehend. We are straitened in ourselves; never in Him.
From this supreme gift we can argue down to the
humblest necessities, the commonest trials of our daily
lot. It adapts itself to the small anxieties of a struggling
household, equally with the largest demands of
our exacting age. "Thou hast given us Thy Son,"
says some one, "and wilt Thou not give us bread?"
We have a generous Lord. His only complaint is that
Great as the gift is, it is not greater than our need. Wanting a Divine Son of man, human life remains a baffled aspiration, a pathway leading to no goal. Lacking Him, the race is incomplete, a body without its head, a flock that has no master. By the coming of Christ in the flesh human life finds its ideal realized; its haunting dream of a Divine helper and leader in the midst of men, of a spiritual and immortal perfection brought within its reach, has attained fulfilment. "God hath raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David; as He spake by the mouth of His holy prophets, which have been since the world began." Jacob's vision has come true. There is the golden ladder, with its foot resting on the cold, stony earth, and its top on heaven's starry platform, with its angels ascending and descending through the darkness; and you may climb its steps, high as you will! So humanity receives its crown of life. Heaven and earth are linked, God and man reunited in the person of Jesus Christ.
But Paul will not suffer us to linger at Bethlehem.
He hastens on to Calvary. The Atonement, not the
Incarnation, is in his view the centre of Christianity.
To the cross of Jesus, rather than to His cradle, he
attaches our salvation. "Jesus Christ gave Himself"—what
Extreme diseases call for extreme remedies. The
case with which our good Physician had to deal was
a desperate one. The world was sick at heart; its
moral nature rotting to the core. Human life was
shattered to its foundation. If it was to be saved, if
the race was to escape perdition, the fabric must be
If there had been, would not the Almighty Father have found it out? would He not have "taken away the cup" from those white, quivering lips? No; He must die. He must consent to be "made sin, made a curse" for us. He must humble His stainless innocence, humble His glorious Godhead down to the dust of death. He must die, at the hands of the men He created and loved, with the horror of the world's sin fastened on Him; die under a blackened heaven, under the averting of the Father's face. And He did it. He said, "Father, Thy will be done. Smite the Shepherd; but let the sheep escape." So He "gave Himself for our sins."
Ah, it was no easy march, no holiday pageant, the coming of the Son of God into this world of ours. He "came to save sinners." Not to help good men—this were a grateful task; but to redeem bad men—the hardest work in God's universe. It tasked the strength and the devotion of the Son of God. Witness Gethsemane. And it will cost His Church something, more haply than we dream of now, if the work of the Redeemer is to be made effectual, and "the travail of His soul satisfied."
In pity and in sorrow was that gift bestowed; in deep humility and sorrow must it be accepted. It is a very humbling thing to "receive the atonement," to be made righteous on such terms as these. A man who has done well, can with satisfaction accept the help given him to do better. But to know that one has done very ill, to stand in the sight of God and truth condemned, marked with the disgrace that the crucifixion of the Son of God has branded on our human nature, with every stain of sin in ourselves revealed in the light of His sacrifice, is a sore abasement. When one has been compelled to cry out, "Lord, save; or I perish!" he has not much left to plume himself upon. There was Saul himself, a perfect moralist, "blameless in the righteousness of the law." Yet he must confess, "How to perform that which is good I find not. In me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing. Wretch that I am, who shall deliver me?" Was not this mortifying to the proud young Pharisee, the man of strict conscience and high-souled moral endeavour? It was like death. And whoever has with sincerity made the same attempt to attain in the strength of his will to a true virtue, has tasted of this bitterness.
This however is what many cannot understand.
The proud heart says, "No; I will not stoop to that.
I have my faults, my defects and errors, not a few.
But as for what you call sin, as for guilt and inborn
depravity, I am not going to tax myself with anything
of the kind. Leave me a little self-respect." So with
the whole herd of the self-complacent, half-religious
Laodiceans. Once a week they confess themselves
"miserable sinners," but their sins against God never
yet cost them one half hour of misery. And Paul's
"gospel is hid to them." If they read this Epistle, they
cannot tell what it is all about; why Paul makes so
much ado, why these thunderings of judgement, these
cries of indignation, these beseechings and protestings
and redoubled arguments,—all because a parcel of
foolish Galatians wanted to play at being Jews! They
are inclined to think with Festus, that this good Paul
was a little beside himself. Alas! to such men, content
with the world's good opinion and their own, the death
of Christ is made of none effect. Its moral grandeur,
its infinite pathos, is lost upon them. They pay it a
conventional respect, but as for believing in it, as for
making it their own, and dying with Christ to live in
Him—they have no idea what it means. That, they
will tell you, is "mysticism," and they are practical
men of the world. They have never gone out of themselves,
never discovered their moral insufficiency.
These are they of whom Jesus said, "The publicans
and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before
you." It is our human independence, our moral self-conceit,
that robs us of the Divine bounty. How
should God give His righteousness to men so well
furnished with their own? "Blessed" then "are the
poor in spirit"; blessed are the broken in heart—poor
II. Sinful men have made an evil world. The world, as Paul knew it, was evil indeed. "The existing evil age," he says, the world as it then was, in contrast with the glory of the perfected Messianic kingdom.
This was a leading distinction of the rabbinical
schools; and the writers of the New Testament adopt it,
with the necessary modification, that "the coming age,"
in their view, commences with the Parousia, the full
advent of the Messiah King.
To Paul at this time the world wore its darkest
aspect. There is a touching emphasis in the order of
this clause. "The present world, evil as it is:" the
words are a sigh for deliverance. The Epistles to
Corinth show us how the world just now was using the
Apostle. The wonder is that one man could bear so
much. "We are made as the filth of the world," he
says, "the offscouring of all things."
True, the world, as we know it, is vastly better than that of Paul's day. Not in vain have Apostles taught, and martyrs bled, and the Church of Christ witnessed and toiled through so many ages. "Other men have laboured; we enter into their labours." An English home of to-day is the flower of the centuries. To those cradled in its pure affections, endowed with health and honourable work and refined tastes, the world must be, and was meant to be, in many aspects a bright and pleasant world. Surely the most sorrowful have known days in which the sky was all sunshine and the very air alive with joy, when the world looked as when it came forth fresh from its Creator's hand, "and behold, it was very good." There is nothing in the Bible, nothing in the spirit of true religion to damp the pure joy of such days as these. But there are "the days of darkness;" and they are many. The Serpent has crept into our Paradise. Death breathes on it his fatal blast.
And when we look outside the sheltered circles of
home-life and Christian brotherhood, what a sea of
misery spreads around us. How limited and partial
is the influence of religion. What a mass of unbelief
and godlessness surges up to the doors of our sanctuaries.
What appalling depths of iniquity exist in
modern society, under the brilliant surface of our
material civilization. And however far the dominance
of sin in human society may be broken—as, please God,
it shall be broken, still evil is likely to remain in many
tempting and perilous forms until the world is burnt to
Now it was the purpose of Jesus Christ, that for
those who believe in Him this world's evil should be
brought absolutely to an end. He promises a full
deliverance from all that tempts and afflicts us here.
With sin, the root of evil, removed, its bitter fruits at
last will disappear. We shall rise to the life immortal.
We shall attain our perfect consummation and bliss
both in body and soul. Kept from the evil of the
world while they remain in it, enabled by His grace to
witness and contend against it, Christ's servants shall
then be lifted clean out for it of ever. "Father, I
will," prayed Jesus, "that they also whom Thou hast
given Me, may be with Me where I am." To that
final salvation, accomplished in the redemption of our
body and the setting up of Christ's heavenly kingdom,
the Apostle's words look forward: "that He might
deliver us out of this present evil world." This was
The self-sacrifice of Christ, and the deliverance it brings, are both, the Apostle concludes, "according to the will of God, even our Father." The wisdom and might of the Eternal are pledged to the work of human redemption. The cross of Jesus Christ is the manifesto of Infinite Love. Let him therefore who rejects it, know against Whom he is contending. Let him who perverts and falsifies it, know with what he is trifling. He who receives and obeys it, may rest assured that all things are working for his good. For all things are in the hands of our God and Father; "to Whom," let us say with Paul, "be glory for ever. Amen."
"I marvel that ye are so quickly removing from him that called you in the grace of Christ unto a different gospel; which is not another gospel: only there are some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. As we have said before, so say I now again, If any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema. For am I now persuading men, or God? or am I seeking to please men? if I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ."—Gal. i. 6-10.
These words were well calculated to startle the Galatians out of their levity. They are like a lightning-flash which shows one to be standing on the edge of a precipice. We see at once the infinite seriousness of the Judaic controversy, the profound gulf that lies between Paul and his opposers. He is for open war. He is in haste to fling his gage of defiance against these enemies of the cross. With all his tact and management, his readiness to consult the susceptibilities and accommodate the scruples of sincere consciences, the Apostle can find no room for conciliation here. He knows the sort of men he has to deal with. He perceives that the whole truth of the Gospel is at stake. Not circumstantials, but essentials; not his personal authority, but the honour of Christ, the doctrine of the cross, is involved in this defection. He must speak plainly; he must act strongly, and at once; or the cause of the Gospel is lost. "If I continued any longer to please men," he says, "I should not be a servant of Christ." To stand on terms with such opponents, to palter with this "other gospel," would be treason against Him. There is but one tribunal at which this quarrel can be decided. To Him "who had called" the Galatian believers "in Christ's grace," who by the same grace had called the Apostle to His service and given him the message he had preached to them—to God he appeals. In His name, and by the authority conferred upon him and for which he must give account, he pronounces these troublers "anathema." They are enemies of Christ, by their treachery excluded from His kingdom.
However unwelcome, however severe the course the
Apostle takes, he has no alternative. "For now," he
cries, "is it men that I persuade, or God?" He must
With a heavy heart Paul has taken up his pen. If
we judge rightly of the date of this letter, he had just
passed through the darkest hour of his experience,
when not his life alone, but the fate of his Gentile
mission hung in the balance. His expulsion from
Ephesus, coming at the same time as the Corinthian
revolt, and followed by a prostrating attack of sickness,
had shaken his soul to its depths. Never had his
heart been so torn with anxiety, never had he felt
himself so beaten down and discomfited, as on that
melancholy journey from Ephesus to Macedonia.
These sentences demand, before we proceed further,
a few words of exegetical definition. For the reference
of "so quickly" it is needless to go beyond the verb
it qualifies. The Apostle cannot surely mean, "so
soon falling away (after your conversion)." For the
Galatian Churches had been founded five, if not seven,
years before this time; and the backsliding of recent
converts is less, and not more, surprising than of
established believers. What astonishes Paul is the
suddenness of this movement, the facility with which
the Galatians yielded to the Judaizing "persuasion,"
the rapid spread of this new leaven. As to the double
"other" (ἕτερον, different,
R.V.—ἄλλο) of vv. 6 and 7,
and the connection of the idiomatic "only" (εἰ μή,
except),—we regard the second other as an abrupt correction
of the first; while the only clause, extending to
the end of ver. 7, mediates between the two, qualifying
the statement "There is no other gospel," by showing
in what sense the writer at first had spoken of
"another." "Ye are falling away," says he, "to
another sort of gospel—which is not another, except
that there are certain that trouble you and would fain
pervert the gospel of Christ." The word gospel is
therefore in the first instance applied ironically. Paul
yields the sacred title up to his opponents, only to
snatch it out of their false hands. "Another gospel!
there is only one; although there are men that falsify
it, and seek to foist something else upon you in its
name." Seven times in this context (vv. 6-11) does
the Apostle reiterate, in noun or verb, this precious
I. In Paul's view, there is but one gospel for mankind. The gospel of Jesus Christ bears a fixed, inviolable character.
On this position the whole teaching of Paul rests,—and
with it, may we not add, Christianity itself?
However variously we may formulate the essentials of
a Christian man's faith, we are generally agreed that
there are such essentials, and that they are found in
Paul's gospel to the Gentiles. With him the good tidings
about Christ constituted a very definite and, as we
should say, dogmatic body of truth. In whatever
degree his gospel has been confused and overlaid by
later teachings, to his own mind its terms were perfectly
clear, and its authority incontestable. With all its
breadth, there is nothing nebulous, nothing limp or
hesitating about the theology of Paul. In its main
doctrines it is fixed and hard as adamant; and at the
challenge of this Judaistic perversion it rings out an
instant and peremptory denial. It was the ark of God
on which the Jewish troublers laid their unholy hands.
"Christ's grace" is lodged in it. God's call to mankind
was conveyed by these "good tidings." The Churches
which the Apostle had planted were "God's husbandry,
God's building;" and woe to the man who tampered
with the work, or sought to lay another foundation
than that which had been laid (
"Well," it may be said, "this is sheer religious
intolerance. Paul is doing what every dogmatist, every
ecclesiastical bigot has done in his turn. His beliefs
are, to be sure, the truth; and accordingly he unchurches
and anathematizes those who cannot agree with him.
With all his nobility of mind, there is in Paul a leaven
of Jewish rancour. He falls short of the sweet reasonableness
of Jesus." So some will say, and in saying
claim to represent the mild and tolerant spirit of our
age. But is there not in every age an intolerance that
is just and necessary? There is a logical intolerance
of sophistry and trifling. There is a moral intolerance
of impurity and deceit. And there is a religious intolerance,
which includes both these and adds to them
a holy jealousy for the honour of God and the spiritual
welfare of mankind. It is mournful indeed to think
how many crimes have been perpetrated under the
cloak of pious zeal. Tantum Religio potuit suadere
malorum. The corruption of Christianity by human
pride and cruelty has furnished copious illustrations of
the terrible line of Lucretius. But the perversion of
this noblest instinct of the soul does not take away
either its reasonableness or its use. The quality of
a passion is one thing; the mode of its expression
is another. The hottest fires of bigotry are cold when
compared with the scorching intolerance of Christ's
denunciations of the Pharisees. The anathemas of
The one gospel has had many interpreters. Their voices, it must be confessed, sound strangely discordant. While the teachings of Christianity excite so intensely a multitude of different minds, of every variety of temper and capacity, contradiction will inevitably arise. Nothing is easier than to scoff at "the Babel of religious opinions." Christian truth is necessarily refracted and discoloured in passing through disordered natures and defective minds. And, alas, that Church which claims to hold the truth without possibility of error or variation, has perverted Christ's gospel most of all.
But notwithstanding all differences, there exists
a large and an increasing measure of agreement
amongst the great body of earnest Christians. Slowly,
yet surely, one debate after another comes to its settlement.
The noise and publicity with which discussion
on matters of faith is carried on in an age of religious
freedom, and when liberty of thought has outrun
mental discipline, should not lead us to exaggerate the
extent of our disagreements. In the midst of human
controversy and error, the Spirit of truth is carrying on
His work. He is the supreme witness of Jesus Christ.
And He abides with us for ever. The newly awakened
For the Galatian readers, as for Paul, there could
be but one gospel. By his voice the call of God had
reached their hearts, (ver. 6; ch. v. 8). The witness of
the Spirit of God and of Christ in the supernatural
gifts they had received, and in the manifold fruit of a
regenerate life (ch. iii. 2-5; v. 22, 23), was evidence to
them that the Apostle's message was "the true gospel
of the grace of God." This they had gratefully
acknowledged at the time of his first visit (ch. iv. 15).
The proclamation of the crucified and risen Christ had
brought to them unspeakable blessing. Through it
they received the knowledge of God; they were made
consciously sons of God, heirs of life eternal (ch. iii. 26;
iv. 6-9; vi. 8). To entertain any other gospel, after
this experience and all these professions, was an act of
The nature and the contents of the two "gospels" current in Galatia will be made clear in the further course of the Epistle. They were the gospels of Grace and of Law respectively; of Salvation by Faith, and by Works; of life in the Spirit, and in the Flesh; of the Cross and the Resurrection on the one hand, and of Circumcision and the Kalendar and "Clean meats" on the other; the gospels of inwardness, and of externalism—of Christ, and of self. The conflict between these two was the great struggle of Paul's life. His success was, historically speaking, the salvation of Christianity.
But this contention did not end with his victory.
The Judaistic perversion appealed to tendencies too
persistent in our nature to be crushed at one blow.
The gospel of externalism is dear to the human heart.
It may take the form of culture and moralities; or of
"services" and sacraments and churchly order; or of
orthodoxy and philanthropy. These and such things
make themselves our idols; and trust in them takes
the place of Faith in the living Christ. It is not enough
that the eyes of our heart should once have seen the
II. We have still to consider the import of the judgement pronounced by Paul upon those who pervert the gospel of Christ. "Let him be anathema. Even should it be ourselves, or an angel from heaven, let him be anathema."
These are tremendous words. Commentators have
been shocked at the Apostle's damning his opponents
after this fashion, and have sought to lighten the weight
of this awful sentence. It has been sometimes toned
down into an act of excommunication or ecclesiastical
Thrice besides has Paul used this ominous word.
The cry "Jesus is anathema," in
This Greek word in its Biblical use has grown out of
the chérem of the Old Testament, the ban declared
against that which was cut off from the Divine mercies
and exposed to the full sweep of judgement. Thus in
Now the Apostle is not writing like a man in a
passion, who flings out his words as missiles, eager
only to wound and confound his opponents. He
repeats the sentence. He quotes it as one that he
had already affirmed in the hearing of his readers.
The passage bears the marks of well-weighed thought
and judicial solemnity. In pronouncing this judgement
on "the troublers," Paul acts under the sense
of Apostolic responsibility. We must place the
sentence in the same line as that of Peter against
Ananias and Sapphira, and of Paul himself against
Elymas the Cypriot sorcerer, and against the incestuous
Corinthian. In each case there is a supernatural
insight and authorization, "the authority which the
Lord gave" and which is wielded by His inspired
Apostle. The exercise of this judicial function was one
of "the signs of the Apostle." This was the proof of
"Christ speaking in him" which Paul was so loth to
give at Corinth,
His anathema struck at men who were the worst enemies of Christ. "We can do nothing against the truth," he says; "but for the truth" he was ready to do and dare everything,—to "come with a rod," as he tells the proud Corinthians. There was no authority, however lofty, that he was not warranted to use on Christ's behalf, no measure, however severe, from which he would shrink, if it were required in defence of the truth of the Gospel. "He possesses weapons, not fleshly, but mighty through God"; and he is prepared to bring them all into play rather than see the gospel perverted or overthrown. Paul will hurl his anathema at the prince of the archangels, should He come "preaching another gospel," tempting his children from their allegiance to Christ. This bolt was not shot a moment too soon. Launched against the legalist conspiracy, and followed up by the arguments of this and the Roman Epistle, it saved the Church from being overpowered by reactionary Judaism. The Apostle's judgement has marked the gospel of the cross for all time as God's inviolable truth, guarded by lightnings.
The sentences of judgement pronounced by the
Apostles present a striking contrast to those that have
fulminated from the Chair of their self-styled successors.
In the Canons of the Council of Trent, for example, we
have counted one hundred and thirty-five anathemas.
A large proportion of these are concerned with the
rights of the priesthood; others with complicated and
secondary points of doctrine; some are directed virtually
against the teaching of Paul himself. Here is one Session vi., Can. xii. Session xxii., Can. vi.
It is the moral conduct of those he judges that
determines in each case the sentence passed by the
Apostle. For a man knowing Jesus Christ, as we
presume the members of the Corinthian Church did
know Him, not to love Him, argues a bad heart. Must
not we count ourselves accursed, if with our knowledge
of Christ we had no love for Him? Such a man is
already virtually anathema. He is severed as a branch
from its vine, ready to be gathered for the burning
(
But does this declaration preclude in such a case the
possibility of repentance? We trow not. It declares
the doom which is due to any, be he man or angel, who
"For I make known to you, brethren, as touching the gospel which was preached by me, that it is not after man. For neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ. For ye have heard of my manner of life in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and made havock of it: and I advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of mine own age among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers."—Gal. i. 11-14.
The cause of Gentile freedom at this crisis was bound up with the person of the Apostle Paul. His Gospel and his Apostleship must stand or fall together. The former was assailed through the latter. He was himself just now "the pillar and stay of the truth." If his character had been successfully attacked and his influence destroyed, nothing, humanly speaking, could have saved Gentile Christendom at this decisive moment from falling under the assaults of Judaism. When he begins his crucial appeal with the words, "Behold, I Paul say unto you" (ch. v. 2), we feel that the issue depends upon the weight which his readers may attach to his personal affirmation. He pits his own truthfulness, his knowledge of Christ, his spiritual discernment and authority, and the respect due to himself from the Galatians, against the pretensions of the new teachers. The comparison is not indeed so open and express as that made in 2 Corinthians; none the less it tacitly runs through this Epistle. Paul is compelled to put himself in the forefront of his argument. In the eyes of his children in the faith, he is bound to vindicate his Apostolic character, defamed by Jewish malice and untruth.
The first two chapters of this Epistle are therefore
Paul's Apologia pro vita sua. With certain chapters in
2 Corinthians, and scattered passages in other letters,
they form the Apostle's autobiography, one of the
most perfect self-portraitures that literature contains.
They reveal to us the man more effectively than
any ostensible description could have done. They
furnish an indispensable supplement to the external
and cursory delineations given in the Acts of the
Apostles. While Luke skilfully presents the outward
framework of Paul's life and the events of his public
This was at once the turning-point in the Apostle's life, and the birth-hour of his gospel. If the Galatians were to understand his teaching, they must understand this occurrence; they must know why he became a Christian, how he had received the message which he brought to them. They would, he felt sure, enter more sympathetically into his doctrine, if they were better acquainted with the way in which he had arrived at it. They would see how well-justified was the authority, how needful the severity with which he writes. Accordingly he begins with a brief relation of the circumstances of his call to the service of Christ, and his career from the days of his Judaistic zeal, when he made havoc of the faith, till the well-known occasion on which he became its champion against Peter himself, the chief of the Twelve (ch. i. 11-ii. 21.) His object in this recital appears to be threefold: to refute the misrepresentations of the Circumcisionists; to vindicate his independent authority as an Apostle of Christ; and further, to unfold the nature and terms of his gospel, so as to pave the way for the theological argument which is to follow, and which forms the body of the Epistle.
I. Paul's gospel was supernaturally conveyed to him,
by a personal intervention of Jesus Christ. This
That the initial revelation was made to him by
Christ in person, was a fact of incalculable importance
for Paul. This had made him an Apostle, in the
august sense in which he claims the title (ver. 1).
This accounts for the vehemence with which he defends
his doctrine, and for the awful sentence which he has
passed upon its impugners. The Divine authorship of
the gospel he preached made it impossible for him
to temporize with its perverters, or to be influenced
by human favour or disfavour in its administration.
Had his teaching been "according to man," he might
have consented to a compromise; he might reasonably
have tried to humour and accommodate Jewish prejudices.
But the case is far otherwise. "I am not at
liberty to please men," he says, "for my gospel comes
directly from Jesus Christ" (vv. 10, 11). So he
"gives" his readers "to know," as if by way of formal
notification. Comp.
The gospel of Paul was inviolable, then, because
of its superhuman character. And this character was
impressed upon it by its superhuman origin: "not
according to man, for neither from man did I receive
it, nor was I taught it, but by a revelation of Jesus
Christ." The Apostle's knowledge of Christianity did
not come through the ordinary channel of tradition
and indoctrination; Jesus Christ had, by a miraculous
interposition, taught him the truth about Himself. He
says, "Neither did I," with an emphasis that points
tacitly to the elder Apostles, whom he mentions a few See ch. ii. 6-14;
But what of this "revelation of Jesus Christ," on
which Paul lays so much stress? Does he mean a
revelation made by Christ, or about Christ? Taken
by itself, the expression, in Greek as in English, bears
either interpretation. In favour of the second construction—viz.
that Paul speaks of a revelation by
which Christ was made known to him—the language
of ver. 16 is adduced: "It pleased God to reveal His
Son in me." Paul's general usage points in the same
direction. With him Christ is the object of manifestation,
preaching, and the like. This genitive is, however, open to the other construction, which
is unquestionable in
On the Damascus road the Apostle Paul found his mission. The vision of the glorified Jesus made him a Christian, and an Apostle. The act was a revelation—that is, in New Testament phrase, a supernatural, an immediately Divine communication of truth. And it was a revelation not conveyed in the first instance, as were the ordinary prophetic inspirations, through the Spirit; "Jesus Christ," in His Divine-human person, made Himself known to His persecutor. Paul had "seen that Just One and heard a voice from His mouth."
The appearance of Jesus to Saul of Tarsus was in itself a gospel, an earnest of the good tidings he was to convey to the world. "Why persecutest thou Me?" that Divine voice said, in tones of reproach, yet of infinite pity. The sight of Jesus the Lord, meeting Saul's eyes, revealed His grace and truth to the persecutor's heart. He was brought in a moment to the obedience of faith; he said, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" He "confessed with his mouth the Lord Jesus"; he "believed in his heart that God had raised Him from the dead." It was true, after all, that "God had made" the crucified Nazarene "both Lord and Christ;" for this was He!
The cross, which had been Saul's stumbling-block, deeply affronting his Jewish pride, from this moment was transformed. The glory of the exalted Redeemer cast back its light upon the tree of shame. The curse of the Law visibly resting upon Him, the rejection of men, marked Him out as God's chosen sacrifice for sin. This explanation at once presented itself to an instructed and keenly theological mind like Saul's, so soon as it was evident that Jesus was not accursed, as he had supposed, but approved by God. So Paul's gospel was given him at a stroke. Jesus Christ dying for our sins, Jesus Christ living to save and to rule—behold "the good news"! The Apostle had it on no less authority than that of the risen Saviour. From Him he received it to publish wide as the world.
Thus Saul of Tarsus was born again. And with
the Christian man, the Christian thinker, the theologian,
was born in him. The Pauline doctrine has its root in
Paul's conversion. It was a single, organic growth, the
seed of which was this "revelation of Jesus Christ."
Its creative impulse was given in the experience of the
memorable hour, when "God who said, Light shall
shine out of darkness, in the face of Jesus Christ
shined" into Saul's heart. As the light of this revelation
penetrated his spirit, he recognised, step by step,
the fact of the resurrection, the import of the crucifixion,
the Divinity of Jesus, His human mediatorship, the
virtue of faith, the office of the Holy Spirit, the futility
of Jewish ritual and works of law, and all the essential
principles of his theology. Given the genius of Saul
and his religious training, and the Pauline system of
doctrine was, one might almost say, a necessary deduction
from the fact of the appearance to him of the glorified
Jesus. If that form of celestial splendour was Jesus,
This intimate relation of doctrine and experience
gives to Paul's teaching a peculiar warmth and freshness,
a vividness of human reality which it everywhere
retains, despite its lofty intellectualism and the scholastic
form in which it is largely cast. It is theology alive,
trembling with emotion, speaking words like flames,
forming dogmas hard as rock, that when you touch
them are yet glowing with the heat of those central
depths of the human spirit from which they were cast
up. The collision of the two great Apostles at Antioch
shows how the strength of Paul's teaching lay in his
inward realization of the truth. There was life behind
his doctrine. He was, and for the time the Jewish
Apostle was not, acting and speaking out of the reality
of spiritual conviction, of truth personally verified. Of
the Apostle Paul above all divines the saying is true,
Pectus facit theologum. And this personal knowledge Ἐπιφανεία, a supernatural appearance, such as that of the Second
Advent. Φωτίζω, comp.
II. His assertion of the Divine origin of his doctrine Paul sustains by referring to the previous course of his life. There was certainly nothing in that to account for his preaching Christ crucified. "For you have heard," he continues, "of my manner of life aforetime, when I followed Judaism."
Here ends the chain of fors reaching from ver. 10 to 13—a
succession of explanations linking Paul's denunciation
of the Christian Judaizers to the fact that he had
himself been a violent anti-Christian Judaist. The seeming
contradiction is in reality a consistent sequence.
Only one who had imbibed the spirit of legalism as
Saul of Tarsus had done, could justly appreciate the
hostility of its principles to the new faith, and the
sinister motives actuating the men who pretended to
"You have heard"—from whom? In the first
instance, probably, from Paul himself. But on this
matter, we may be pretty sure, his opponents would
have something to say. They did not scruple to assert
that he "still preached circumcision" Ch. v. 11; comp.
The Apostle sorrowfully confesses "that above
measure he persecuted the Church of God and laid
it waste." His friend Luke makes the same admission
in similar language.
Saul's persecution of the Church was the natural
result of his earlier training, of the course to which in
his youth he committed himself. The Galatians had
heard also "how proficient he was in Judaism, beyond
many of his kindred and age; that he was surpassed
by none in zeal for their ancestral traditions." His
birth (
Our modern critics, however, think that they know
Paul better than he knew himself. They hold that the
problem raised by this passage is capable of a natural
solution. Psychological analysis, we are told, sets
the matter in a different light. Saul of Tarsus had a
tender conscience. Underneath his fevered and ambitious
zeal, there lay in the young persecutor's heart
a profound misgiving, a mortifying sense of his
failure, and the failure of his people, to attain the
righteousness of the Law. The seventh chapter of
his Epistle to the Romans is a leaf taken out of the
inner history of this period of the Apostle's life.
Through what a stern discipline the Tarsian youth had
passed in these legal years! How his haughty spirit
chafed and tortured itself under the growing consciousness
of its moral impotence! The Law had
been truly his παιδαγωγός (ch. iii. 24), a severe tutor,
preparing him unconsciously "for Christ." In this
state of mind such scenes as the martyrdom of Stephen
could not but powerfully affect Saul, in spite of himself.
The bearing of the persecuted Nazarenes, the
words of peace and forgiveness that they uttered under
their sufferings, stirred questionings in his breast not
always to be silenced. Self-distrust and remorse were
secretly undermining the rigour of his Judaic faith.
They acted like a "goad" ( Les Apôtres, p. 180, note 1.
Such is the diagnosis of Paul's conversion offered us
by rationalism; and it is not wanting in boldness nor
in skill. But the corner-stone on which it rests, the
hinge of the whole theory, is imaginary and in fatal
contradiction with the facts of the case. Paul himself
knows nothing of the remorse imputed to him previously
to the vision of Jesus. The historian of the Acts knows
nothing of it. In a nature so upright and conscientious
as that of Saul, this misgiving would at least have
induced him to desist from persecution. From first to
last his testimony is, "I did it ignorantly, in unbelief."
It was this ignorance, this absence of any sense of
The Apostle was manifestly innocent of any such
predisposition to Christian faith as the above theory
imputes to him. True, he was conscious in those
Judaistic days of his failure to attain righteousness,
of the disharmony existing between "the law of his
reason" and that which wrought "in his members."
His conviction of sin supplied the moral precondition
necessary in every case to saving faith in Christ. But
this negative condition does not help us in the least to
explain the vision of the glorified Jesus. By no psychological
process whatever could the experience of
It was this sensible and outward revelation that led to the inward revelation of the Redeemer to his soul, of which Paul goes on to speak in ver. 16. Without the latter the former would have been purposeless and useless. The objective vision could only have revealed a "Christ after the flesh," had it not been the means of opening Saul's closed heart to the influence of the Spirit of Christ. It was the means to this, and in the given circumstances the indispensable means.
To a history that "knows no miracles," the Apostle Paul must remain an enigma. His faith in the crucified Jesus is equally baffling to naturalism with that of the first disciples, who had laid Him in the grave. When the Apostle argues that his antecedent relations to Christianity were such as to preclude his conversion having come about by natural human means, we are bound to admit both the sincerity and the conclusiveness of his appeal.
"But when it was the good pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me: but I went away into Arabia; and again I returned unto Damascus."—Gal. i. 15-17.
The Apostle does not surely mean by "in me," in
my case, through me (to others). This gives a sense
true in itself, and expressed by Paul elsewhere (ver. 24;
I. The substance of Paul's gospel was, therefore, given him by the unveiling of the Redeemer to his heart.
The "revelation" of ver. 16 takes up and completes
that of ver. 12. The dazzling appearance of Christ
before his eyes and the summons of His voice addressed
to Saul's bodily ears formed the special mode in which
it pleased God to "call him by His grace." But
"whom He called, He also justified." In this further
act of grace salvation is first personally realised, and
the gospel becomes the man's individual possession.
This experience ensued upon the acceptance of the fact
that the crucified Jesus was the Christ. But this was
by no means all. As the revelation penetrated further
into the Apostle's soul, he began to apprehend its
Of this interior revelation the Holy Spirit, according
to the Apostle's doctrine, had been the organ. The
Lord on first meeting the gathered Apostles after His
resurrection "breathed upon them, saying, Receive ye
the Holy Ghost" (
It is not necessary to fix the precise occasion of the
second revelation, or to connect it specifically with the
visit of Ananias to Saul in Damascus, much less with
his later "ecstasy" in the temple (
II. In the light of this inner revelation Paul received his Gentile mission.
He speedily perceived that this was the purpose
with which the revelation was made: "that I should
preach Him among the Gentiles." The three accounts
of his conversion furnished by the Acts witness to
the same effect. Whether we should suppose that the
Lord Jesus gave Saul this commission directly, at His
first appearance, as seems to be implied in
In the Apostle's view, his personal salvation and
that of the race were objects united from the first. Not
as a privileged Jew, but as a sinful man, the Divine
grace had found him out. The righteousness of God
was revealed to him on terms which brought it within
III. For this vocation the Apostle had been destined by God from the beginning. "It pleased God to do this," he says, "who had marked me out from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace."
While "Saul was yet breathing out threatening and
slaughter" against the disciples of Jesus, how different
a future was being prepared for him! How little can
we forecast the issue of our own plans, or of those we
form for others. His Hebrew birth, his rabbinical
proficiency, the thoroughness with which he had
mastered the tenets of Legalism, had fitted him like no
But his mission was concealed till the appointed
hour. Thinking of his personal election, he reminds
himself of the words spoken to Jeremiah touching his
prophetic call. "Before I formed thee in the belly I
knew thee; and before thou camest out of the womb
I sanctified thee. I appointed thee a prophet unto the
nations" (
The manner in which Saul of Tarsus had been prepared
all his life long for the service of Christ, magnified
to his eyes the sovereign grace of God. "He called
me through His grace." The call came at precisely the
fit time; it came at a time and in a manner calculated
to display the Divine compassion in the highest possible
degree. This lesson Paul could never forget. To the
last he dwells upon it with deep emotion. "In me,"
he writes to Timothy, "Jesus Christ first showed forth
all His longsuffering. I was a blasphemer, a persecutor,
insolent and injurious; but I obtained mercy" (
IV. From Jesus Christ in person Paul had received his knowledge of the Gospel, without human intervention. In the revelation of Christ to his soul he possessed the substance of the truth he was afterwards to teach; and with the revelation there came the commission to proclaim it to all men. His gospel-message was in its essence complete; the Apostleship was already his. Such are the assertions the Apostle makes in reply to his gainsayers. And he goes on to show that the course he took after his conversion sustains these lofty claims: "When God had been pleased to reveal His Son in me, immediately (right from the first) I took no counsel with flesh and blood. I avoided repairing to Jerusalem, to the elder Apostles; I went away into Arabia, and back again to Damascus. It was three years before I set foot in Jerusalem."
If that were so, how could Paul have received his
doctrine or his commission from the Church of Jerusalem,
as his traducers alleged? He acted from the
outset under the sense of a unique Divine call, that
allowed of no human validation or supplement. Had
the case been otherwise, had Paul come to his knowledge
of Christ by ordinary channels, his first impulse
There were, no doubt, other reasons for this step.
Why did he choose Arabia for his sojourn? and what,
pray, was he doing there? The Apostle leaves us to our
own conjectures. Solitude, we imagine, was his principal
object. His Arabian retreat reminds us of the Arabian
exile of Moses, of the wilderness discipline of John the
Baptist, and the "forty days" of Jesus in the wilderness.
In each of these instances, the desert retirement
The Acts of the Apostles omits this Arabian episode
( ἡμέ�αι ἱκαναί, a considerable time. The expression is indefinite. Ver. 18: that is, parts of "three years," according to ancient
reckoning—say from 36 to 38 A.D., possibly less than two in actual
duration.
The place of the Arabian journey seems to us to lie
between vv. 21 and 22 of
The disappearance of Saul during this interval helps
however, as we think, to explain a subsequent statement
in Luke's narrative that is certainly perplexing (
The two narratives—the history of Luke and the letter of Paul—relate the same series of events, but from almost opposite standpoints. Luke dwells upon Paul's connection with the Church at Jerusalem and its Apostles. Paul is maintaining his independence of them. There is no contradiction; but there is just such discrepancy as will arise where two honest and competent witnesses are relating identical facts in a different connection.
"Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and tarried with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, but only James the Lord's brother. Now touching the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not. Then I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia And I was still unknown by face unto the churches of Judæa which were in Christ: but they only heard say, He that once persecuted us now preacheth the faith of which he once made havock; and they glorified God in me."—Gal. i. 18-24.
A clear understanding of this course of events was
essential to the vindication of Paul's position in the
eyes of the Galatians. The "troublers" told them that
Paul's doctrine was not that of the mother Church;
that his knowledge of the gospel and authority to
preach it came from the elder Apostles, with whom
since his attack upon Peter at Antioch he was at open
variance. They themselves had come down from
Judæa on purpose to set his pretensions in their true
Modern rationalism has espoused the cause of these
"deceitful workers" (
Let us endeavour to form a clear conception of the facts touching Paul's connection with the first Apostles and his attitude and feeling towards the Jewish Church, as they are in evidence in the first two chapters of this Epistle.
I. On the one hand, it is clear that the Gentile Apostle's relations to Peter and the Twelve were those of personal independence and official equality.
This is the aspect of the case on which Paul lays
stress. His sceptical critics argue that under his
assertion of independence there is concealed an opposition
of principle, a "radical divergence." The sense of
independence is unmistakable. It is on that side that
the Apostle seeks to guard himself. With this aim
he styles himself at the outset "an Apostle not from
men, nor by man"—neither man-made nor man-sent.
Such apostles there were; and in this character, we
imagine, the Galatian Judaistic teachers, like those of
Corinth,
But at last, "after three years," Saul "did go up to Jerusalem." What was it for? To report himself to the authorities of the Church and place himself under their direction? To seek Peter's instruction, in order to obtain a more assured knowledge of the gospel he had embraced? Nothing of the kind. Not even "to question Cephas," as some render ἱστορῆσαι, following an older classical usage—"to gain information" from him; but "I went up to make acquaintance with Cephas." Saul went to Jerusalem carrying in his heart the consciousness of his high vocation, seeking, as an equal with an equal, to make personal acquaintance with the leader of the Twelve. Cephas (as he was called at Jerusalem) must have been at this time to Paul a profoundly interesting personality. He was the one man above all others whom the Apostle felt he must get to know, with whom it was necessary for him to have a thorough understanding.
How momentous was this meeting! How much we
could wish to know what passed between these two in
the conversations of the fortnight they spent together.
One can imagine the delight with which Peter would
relate to his listener the scenes of the life of Jesus;
how the two men would weep together at the recital of
the Passion, the betrayal, trial and denial, the agony of
the Garden, the horror of the cross; with what mingled
awe and triumph he would describe the events of the
Resurrection and the Forty Days, the Ascension, and
the baptism of fire. In Paul's account of the appearances
"But other of the Apostles," Paul goes on to say,
"saw I none, but only James the brother of the Lord."
James, no Apostle surely; neither in the higher sense,
for he cannot be reasonably identified with "James the
son of Alphæus;" nor in the lower, for he was, as far
as we can learn, stationary at Jerusalem. But he stood
so near the Apostles, and was in every way so important
a person, that if Paul had omitted the name of
James in this connection, he would have seemed to pass
So cardinal are the facts just stated (vv. 15-19), as
bearing on Paul's apostleship, and so contrary to the
representations made by the Judaizers, that he pauses
to call God to witness his veracity: "Now in what I
am writing to you, lo, before God, I lie not." The
Apostle never makes this appeal lightly; but only in
support of some averment in which his personal honour
and his strongest feelings are involved. See
But now we are confronted with the narrative of
the Acts (chap. ix. 26-30), which renders a very
different account of this passage in the Apostle's life.
This brief visit to the Holy City was a second crisis in Paul's career. He was now thrust forth upon his mission to the heathen. It was evident that he was not to look for success among his Jewish brethren. He lost no opportunity of appealing to them; but it was commonly with the same result as at Damascus and Jerusalem. Throughout life he carried with him this "great sorrow and unceasing pain of heart," that to his "kinsmen according to the flesh," for whose salvation he could consent to forfeit his own, his gospel was hid. In their eyes he was a traitor to Israel, and must count upon their enmity. Everything conspired to point in one direction: "Depart," the Divine voice had said, "for I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles." And Paul obeyed. "I went," he relates here, "into the regions of Syria and Cilicia" (ver. 21).
To Tarsus, the Cilician capital, Saul voyaged from
This period was divided into two parts. For five
or six years the Apostle laboured alone; afterwards in
conjunction with Barnabas, who invited his help at
Antioch (
Between this journey and the really important visit
to Jerusalem introduced in chap. ii. 1, Barnabas and
Paul undertook, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit
expressed through the Church of Antioch (
During this long period, the Apostle tells us, he
"remained unknown by face to the Churches of Judæa." For the ministry alluded to in
If there was any man to whom as a Christian
teacher he was bound to defer, any one who might be
regarded as his official superior, it was the Apostle
Peter. Yet against this very Cephas he had dared
openly to measure himself. Had he been a disciple of
the Jewish Apostle, a servant of the Jerusalem Church,
how would this have been possible? Had he not possessed
an authority derived immediately from Christ,
how could he have stood out alone, against the prerogative
of Peter, against the personal friendship and local
influence of Barnabas, against the example of all his
Jewish brethren? Nay, he was prepared to rebuke
all the Apostles, and anathematize all the angels,
rather than see Christ's gospel set at nought. For it
was in his view "the gospel of the glory of the blessed
God, committed to my trust!" (
II. But while Paul stoutly maintains his independence, he does this in such a way as to show that there was no hostility or personal rivalry between himself and the first Apostles. His relations to the Jewish Church were all the while those of friendly acquaintance and brotherly recognition.
That Nazarene sect which he had of old time persecuted,
was "the Church of God" (ver. 13). To
the end of his life this thought gave a poignancy to
the Apostle's recollection of his early days. To
"the Churches of Judæa" Ver. 22. It is arbitrary in Meyer to exclude from this category
the Church of Jerusalem.
He speaks of the elder Apostles in terms of unfeigned
respect. In his reference in ch. ii. 11-21 to the error
of Peter, there is great plainness of speech, but no
bitterness. When the Apostle says that he "went up
to Jerusalem to see Peter," and describes James as
"the Lord's brother," and when he refers to both of
them, along with John, as "those accounted to be
pillars," can he mean anything but honour to these
honoured men? To read into these expressions a
covert jealousy and to suppose them written by way
of disparagement, seems to us a strangely jaundiced
and small-minded sort of criticism. The Apostle
testifies that Peter held a Divine trust in the Gospel,
and that God had "wrought for Peter" to this
effect, as for himself. By claiming the testimony of
the Pillars at Jerusalem to his vocation, he shows his
profound respect for theirs. When the unfortunate
difference arose between Peter and himself at Antioch,
Paul is careful to show that the Jewish Apostle on that
occasion was influenced by the circumstances of the
In view of these facts, it is impossible to believe, as the Tendency critics would have us do, that Paul when he wrote this letter was at feud with the Jewish Church. In that case, while he taxes Peter with "dissimulation" (ch. ii. 11-13), he is himself the real dissembler, and has carried his dissimulation to amazing lengths. If he is in this Epistle contending against the Primitive Church and its leaders, he has concealed his sentiments toward them with an art so crafty as to overreach itself. He has taught his readers to reverence those whom on this hypothesis he was most concerned to discredit. The terms under which he refers to Cephas and the Judean Churches would be just so many testimonies against himself, if their doctrine was the "other gospel" of the Galatian troublers, and if Paul and the Twelve were rivals for the suffrages of the Gentile Christians.
The one word which wears a colour of detraction is
the parenthesis in ver. 6 of ch. ii.: "whatever aforetime We follow Lightfoot in reading the ποτὲ as in ch. i. 23, and
everywhere else in Paul, as a particle of time.
"Then after the space of fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem
with Barnabas, taking Titus also with me. And I went up by revelation;
and I laid before them the gospel which I preach among the
Gentiles, but privately before them who were of repute, [asking them
whether I am running, or had run, in vain: but not even Titus who
was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. But it
was The writer is compelled in this instance to depart from the rendering
of the English Version, for reasons given in the sequel. See also
a paper on Paul and Titus at Jerusalem, in The Expositor, 3rd series,
vol. vi., pp. 435-442. The last three words within the brackets agree
with the R.V. margin.
These fourteen years probably amounted to something less in our
reckoning,—say, from 38 to 51 A.D. Some six years elapsed before
Paul was summoned to Antioch.
We are apt to think of the Apostle Paul only as we
see him in the full tide of his activity, carrying "from
Jerusalem round about unto Illyricum" the standard of
the cross and planting it in one after another of the
great cities of the Empire, "always triumphing in every
place;" or issuing those mighty Epistles whose voice
shakes the world. We forget the earlier term of preparation,
these years of silence and patience, of unrecorded
toil in a comparatively narrow and humble
sphere, which had after all their part in making Paul
the man he was. If Christ Himself would not "clutch"
at His Divine prerogatives (
Paul claims here the initiative in the momentous
visit to Jerusalem undertaken by himself and Barnabas,
of which he is going to speak. In
The Apostle expresses himself with modesty, but
in such a way as to show that he was regarded in this
juncture as the champion of the Gentile cause. The
"revelation" that prompted the visit came to him.
The "taking up of Titus" was his distinct act (ver. 1).
Unless Paul has deceived himself, he was quite the
leading figure in the Council; it was his doctrine and
his Apostleship that exercised the minds of the chiefs Comp.
This meeting at Jerusalem took place in 51, or it
may be, 52 A.D. We make no doubt that it is the
same with the Council of Hibbert Lectures, p. 103. This testimony is the more valuable as
coming from the ablest living exponent of the Baurian theory.
I. The emphasis of ver. 1 rests upon its last clause,—taking
along with me also Titus. Not "Titus as well
as Barnabas"—this cannot be the meaning of the
"also"—for Barnabas was Paul's colleague, deputed
equally with himself by the Church of Antioch; nor
"Titus as well as others"—there were other members
of the deputation (
The mention of Titus' name in this connection was
calculated to raise a lively interest in the minds of
the Apostle's readers. He is introduced as known to
the Galatians; indeed by this time his name was
familiar in the Pauline Churches, as that of a fellow-traveller
and trusted helper of the Apostle. He was
with Paul in the latter part of the third missionary
tour—so we learn from the Corinthian letters—and
therefore probably in the earlier part of the same
journey, when the Apostle paid his second visit to
Galatia. He belonged to the heathen mission, and
was Paul's "true child after a common faith" (
But the Apostle goes on to say, that he "went up
in accordance with a revelation." For this was one
"And I put before them (the Church at Jerusalem) the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles—but privately to those of repute: am I running (said I), or have I run, in vain?" The latter clause we read interrogatively, along with such excellent grammatical interpreters as Meyer, Wieseler, and Hofmann. Paul had not come to Jerusalem in order to solve any doubt in his own mind; but he wished the Church of Jerusalem to declare its mind respecting the character of his ministry. He was not "running as uncertainly;" nor in view of the "revelation" just given him could he have any fear for the result of his appeal. But it was in every way necessary that the appeal should be made.
The interjected words, "but privately," etc., indicate
that there were two meetings during the conference,
such as those which seem to be distinguished in
The Apostle, in bringing Titus, had brought up the
subject-matter of the controversy. The "gospel of the
uncircumcision" stood before the Jewish authorities,
an accomplished fact. Titus was there, by the side
of Paul, a sample—and a noble specimen, we can well
believe—of the Gentile Christendom which the Jewish
Church must either acknowledge or repudiate. How
will they treat him? Will they admit this foreign
protege of Paul to their communion? Or will they
require him first to be circumcised? The question
at issue could not take a form more crucial for the
prejudices of the mother Church. It was one thing
to acknowledge uncircumcised fellow-believers in the
abstract, away yonder at Antioch or Iconium, or even
at Cæsarea; and another thing to see Titus standing
amongst them in his heathen uncleanness, on the
The answer, the triumphant answer, to Paul's appeal
comes in the next verse: "Nay, not even For this use of ἀλλ' ο�δὲ compare
The attempt made to bring about Titus' circumcision
signally failed. Its failure was the practical reply to
the question which Paul tells us (ver. 2) he had put
to the authorities in Jerusalem; or, according to the
more common rendering of ver. 2b, it was the answer to
the apprehension under which he addressed himself to
them. On the former of these views of the connection,
which we decidedly prefer, the authorities are clear of
any share in the "compulsion" of Titus. When the
Apostle gives the statement that his Gentile companion
"was not compelled to be circumcised" as the reply to
his appeal to "those of repute," it is as much as to say:
"The chiefs at Jerusalem did not require Titus' circumcision.
They repudiated the attempt of certain parties
to force this rite upon him." This testimony precisely
accords with the terms of the rescript of the Council,
and with the speeches of Peter and James, given in
To the authorities at Jerusalem the question put by
the delegates from Antioch on the one side, and by the
Circumcisionists on the other, was perfectly clear. If
they insist on Titus' circumcision, they disown Paul
and the Gentile mission: if they accept Paul's gospel,
they must leave Titus alone. Paul and Barnabas
Here the Apostle pauses, as his Gentile readers must have paused and drawn a long breath of relief or of astonishment at what he has just alleged. If Titus was not compelled to be circumcised, even at Jerusalem, who, they might ask, was going to compel them?—The full stop should therefore be placed at the end of ver. 3, not ver. 2. Vv. 1-3 form a paragraph complete in itself. Its last sentence resolves the decisive question raised in this visit of Paul's to Jerusalem, when he "took with him also Titus."
II. The opening words of ver. 4 have all the appearance
of commencing a new sentence. This sentence, concluded
in ver. 5, is grammatically incomplete; but that
is no reason for throwing it upon the previous sentence,
to the confusion of both. There is a transition of thought,
marked by the introductory But, This particle is a serious obstacle in the way of the ordinary
punctuation, which attaches the following clause to ver. 3. The δὲ is
similar to that of ver. 6 (ἀπὸ δὲ τ. δοκούντων); not of κατ' ἰδίαν δὲ in ver.
2, nor of θανάτον δὲ σταύ�ου (
To know what Paul means by "false brethren," we
must turn to ch. i. 6-9, iii. 1, iv. 17, v. 7-12, vi. 12-14,
in this Epistle; and again to
But where, and how, were these traitors "privily
brought in?" Brought in, we answer, to the field of
the Gentile mission; and doubtless by local Jewish
sympathisers, who introduced them without the concurrence
of the officers of the Church. They "came in
privily"—slipped in by stealth—"to spy out our liberty
which we have in Christ Jesus." Now it was at Antioch
and in the pagan Churches that this liberty existed in
But as the Apostle dilates on the conduct of these Jewish intriguers, the precursors of such an army of troublers, his heart takes fire; in the rush of his emotion he is carried away from the original purport of his sentence, and breaks it off with a burst of indignation: "To whom," he cries, "not even for an hour did we yield by subjection, that the truth of the gospel might abide with you." A breakdown like this—an anacoluthon, as the grammarians call it—is nothing strange in Paul's style. Despite the shipwrecked grammar, the sense comes off safely enough. The clause, "we did not yield," etc., describes in a negative form, and with heightened effect, the course the Apostle had pursued from the first in dealing with the false brethren. In this unyielding spirit he had acted, without a moment's wavering, from the hour when, guided by the Holy Spirit, he set out for Jerusalem with the uncircumcised Titus by his side, until he heard his Gentile gospel vindicated by the lips of Peter and James, and received from them the clasp of fellowship as Christ's acknowledged Apostle to the heathen.
It was therefore the action of Jewish interlopers,
men of the same stamp as those infesting the Galatian
Churches, which occasioned Paul's second, public visit
to Jerusalem, and his consultation with the heads of the
Judean Church. This decisive course he was himself
inspired to take; while at the same time it was taken
on behalf and under the direction of the Church of
Antioch, the metropolis of Gentile Christianity. He
had gone up with Barnabas and "certain others"—including
the Greek Titus chosen by himself—the
company forming a representative deputation, of which
Paul was the leader and spokesman. This measure was
the boldest and the only effectual means of combatting
"But from those who were reputed to be somewhat (what they once were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth not man's person)—they, I say, who were of repute imparted nothing to me: but contrariwise, when they saw that I had been intrusted with the gospel of the uncircumcision, even as Peter with the gospel of the circumcision (for he that wrought for Peter unto the apostleship of the circumcision wrought for me also unto the Gentiles); and when they perceived the grace that was given unto me, James and Cephas and John, they who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship, that we should go unto the Gentiles, and they unto the circumcision; only they would that we should remember the poor; which very thing I was also zealous to do."—Gal. ii. 6-10.
The grammatical connection of the first paragraph,
like that of vv. 2, 3, is involved and disputable. We
construe its clauses in the following way:—(1) Ver. 6
begins with a But, contrasting "those of repute" with
the "false brethren" dealt with in the last sentence.
It contains another anacoluthon (or incoherence of language), For this rendering of ποτὲ comp. ch. i. 13, 23; and see Lightfoot,
or Beet, in loc. Comp.
(2) Vv. 7-9 state the positive, as ver. 6 the negative
side of the relation between Paul and the elder Apostles,
still keeping in view the principle laid down in the
former verse. "Nay, on the contrary, when they saw
that I have in charge the gospel of the uncircumcision,
as Peter that of the circumcision (ver. 7)—and when
they perceived the grace that had been given me, James
and Cephas and John, those renowned pillars of the
Church, gave the right hand of fellowship to myself and
(3) Ver. 8 comes in as a parenthesis, explaining how the authorities at Jerusalem came to see that this trust belonged to Paul. "For," he says, "He that in Peter's case displayed His power in making him (above all others) Apostle of the Circumcision, did as much for me in regard to the Gentiles." It is not human ordination, but Divine inspiration that makes a minister of Jesus Christ. The noble Apostles of Jesus had the wisdom to see this. It had pleased God to bestow this grace on their old Tarsian persecutor; and they frankly acknowledged the fact.
Thus Paul sets forth, in the first place, the completeness of his Apostolic qualifications, put to proof at the crisis of the circumcision controversy; and in the second place, the judgement formed respecting him and his office by the first Apostles and companions of the Lord.
I. "To me those of repute added nothing." Paul had spent but a fortnight in the Christian circle of Jerusalem, fourteen years ago. Of its chiefs he had met at that time only Peter and James, and them in the capacity of a visitor, not as a disciple or a candidate for office. He had never sought the opportunity, nor felt the need, of receiving instruction from the elder Apostles during all the years in which he had preached Christ amongst the heathen. It was not likely he would do so now. When he came into conference and debate with them at the Council, he showed himself their equal, neither in knowledge nor authority "a whit behind the very chiefest." And they were conscious of the same fact.
On the essentials of the gospel Paul found himself
in agreement with the Twelve. This is implied in the
language of ver. 6. When one writes, "A adds nothing We cannot explain π�οσανέθεντο here by the ἀναθέμην of ver. 2,
as though Paul wished to say, "I imparted to them my gospel; they
imparted to me nothing further." Forπ�ος- implies direction, rather
than addition. See Meyer on this verb in ch. i. 16.
So Paul declares; and we can readily believe him. Nay, we are tempted to think that it was rather the Pillars who might need to learn from him, than he from them. In doctrine, Paul holds the primacy in the band of the Apostles. While all were inspired by the Spirit of Christ, the Gentile Apostle was in many ways a more richly furnished man than any of the rest. The Paulinism of Peter's First Epistle goes to show that the debt was on the other side. Their earlier privileges and priceless store of recollections of "all that Jesus did and taught," were matched on Paul's side by a penetrating logic, a breadth and force of intellect applied to the facts of revelation, and a burning intensity of spirit, which in their combination were unique. The Pauline teaching, as it appears in the New Testament, bears in the highest degree the marks of original genius, the stamp of a mind whose inspiration is its own.
Modern criticism even exaggerates Paul's originality.
It leaves the other Apostles little more than a negative
part to play in the development of Christian truth. In
some of its representations, the figure of Paul appears
to overshadow even that of the Divine Master. It
was Paul's creative genius, it is said, his daring idealism,
that deified the human Jesus, and transformed the
scandal of the cross into the glory of an atonement
reconciling the world to God. Such theories Paul
himself would have regarded with horror. "I received
of the Lord that which I delivered unto you:" such
is his uniform testimony. If he owed so little as a
minister of Christ to his brother Apostles, he felt with
the most sincere humility that he owed everything to
Christ. The agreement of Paul's teaching with that of
the other New Testament writers, and especially with
that of Jesus in the Gospels, proves that, however
The Judaizers, however, persistently asserted Paul's
dependence on the elder Apostles. "The authority of
the Primitive Church, the Apostolic tradition of Jerusalem"—this
was the fulcrum of their argument. Where
could Paul, they asked, have derived his knowledge of
Christ, but from this fountain-head? And the power
that made him, could unmake him. Those who commissioned
him had the right to overrule him, or even
to revoke his commission. Was it not known that he
had from time to time resorted to Jerusalem; that he
The self-depreciation, the keen sense of inferiority
in outward respects, so evident in Paul's allusions to
this subject elsewhere, is after all not wanting here.
For when he says, "God regards not man's person," it
is evident that in respect of visible qualifications Paul
felt that he had few pretensions to make. Appearances
were against him. And those who "glory in
appearance" were against him too (
So we come back to the declaration of the Apostle
II. Instead, therefore, of assuming to be his superiors, or offering to bestow something of their own on Paul, the three renowned pillars of the faith at Jerusalem acknowledged him as a brother Apostle.
"They saw that I am intrusted with the gospel of the
uncircumcision." The form of the verb implies a trust
given in the past and taking effect in the present, a
settled fact. Once for all, this charge had devolved
on Paul. He is "appointed herald and apostle" of
"Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all,—teacher
of the Gentiles in faith and truth" (
The conference at Jerusalem in itself furnished
conclusive evidence of Paul's Apostolic commission.
The circumcision controversy was a test not only for
Gentile Christianity, but at the same time for its
Apostle and champion. Paul brought to this discussion
a knowledge and insight, a force of character, a
conscious authority and unction of the Holy Spirit, that
powerfully impressed the three great men who listened
to him. The triumvirate at Jerusalem well knew that
Paul had not received his marvellous gifts through Ch. i. 18. See Chapter V., p. 87.
John had not forgotten his Master's reproof for
banning the man that "followeth not with us" ( See
Why then does not Paul say outright, "they acknowledged
me an Apostle, the equal of Peter?" Some are Zum Evangelien d. Paulus und d. Petrus, p. 273. Holsten is the
keenest and most logical of all the Baurian succession.
The Church at Jerusalem, as we gather from vv.
7, 8, observed in Paul "signs of the Apostle"
resembling those borne by Peter. His Gentile commission
ran parallel with Peter's Jewish commission.
The labours of the two men were followed by the same
kind of success, and marked by similar displays of
miraculous power. The like seal of God was stamped
on both. This correspondence runs through the Acts
of the Apostles. Compare, for example, Paul's sermon
at Antioch in Pisidia with that of Peter on the Day of
Pentecost; the healing of the Lystran cripple and the
punishment of Elymas, with the case of the lame man
at the Temple gate and the encounter of Peter and
Simon Magus. The conjunction of the names of Peter
and Paul was familiar to the Apostolic Church. The
parallelism between the course of these great Apostles
was no invention of second-century orthodoxy, set up
in the interests of a "reconciling hypothesis;" it
attracted public attention as early as 51 A.D., while
they were still in their mid career. If this idea so
strongly possessed the minds of the Jewish Christian
leaders and influenced their action at the Council of Ch. i. 12; iii. 22; ix. 5.
But had not Peter also a share in the Gentile
mission? Does not the division of labour made at
this conference appear to shut out the senior Apostle
from a field to which he had the prior claim? "Ye
know," said Peter at the Council, "how that a good
while ago God made choice among you, that by my
mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel,
and believe" (
Let us observe that it is two different provinces, not
different gospels, that are in view. When the Apostle
speaks of "the gospel of the uncircumcision" as committed
to himself, and that "of the circumcision" to
Peter, he never dreams of any one supposing, as some
of his modern critics persist in doing, that he meant
two different doctrines. How can that be possible,
when he has declared those anathema who preach any
other gospel? He has laid his gospel before the heads
of the Jerusalem Church. Nothing has occurred there,
nothing is hinted here, to suggest the existence of a
"radical divergence." If James and the body of the
Judean Church really sympathised with the Circumcisionists,
with those whom the Apostle calls "false
brethren," how could he with any sincerity have come
to an agreement with them, knowing that this tremendous
gulf was lying all the while between the Pillars
and himself? Zeller argues that the transaction was
simply a pledge of "reciprocal toleration, a merely
external concordat between Paul and the original
Apostles." The Acts of the Apostles critically investigated, vol. ii., pp. 28, 30:
Eng. Trans. Paulus, vol. i., p. 130: Eng. Trans.
Never did the Church more deeply realise than at
her first Council the truth, that "there is one body
and one Spirit; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one
God and Father of all, who is above all, and through
all, and in all" (
"Only they would have us remember the poor"—a
circumstance mentioned partly by way of reminder to
the Galatians touching the collection for Jerusalem,
which Paul had already set on foot amongst them
(
James, Peter, John, and Paul—it was a memorable
day when these four men met face to face. What a
mighty quaternion! Amongst them they have virtually
made the New Testament and the Christian Church.
They represent the four sides of the one foundation of
the City of God. Of the Evangelists, Matthew holds
affinity with James; Mark with Peter; and Luke with
Paul. James clings to the past and embodies the
transition from Mosaism to Christianity. Peter is the
With Peter and James Paul had met before, and was to meet again. But so far as we can learn, this was the only occasion on which his path crossed that of John. Nor is this Apostle mentioned again in Paul's letters. In the Acts he appears but once or twice, standing silent in Peter's shadow. A holy reserve surrounds John's person in the earlier Apostolic history. His hour was not yet come. But his name ranked in public estimation amongst the three foremost of the Jewish Church; and he exercised, doubtless, a powerful, though quiet, conciliatory influence in the settlement of the Gentile question. The personality of Paul excited, we may be sure, the profoundest interest in such a mind as that of John. He absorbed, and yet in a sense transcended, the Pauline theology. The Apocalypse, although the most Judaic book of the New Testament, is penetrated with the influence of Paulinism. The detection in it of a covert attack on the Gentile Apostle is simply one of the mare's nests of a super-subtle and suspicious criticism. John was to be the heir of Paul's labours at Ephesus and in Asia Minor. And John's long life, touching the verge of the second century, his catholic position, his serene and lofty spirit, blending in itself and resolving into a higher unity the tendencies of James and Peter and Paul, give us the best assurance that in the Apostolic age there was indeed "One, holy, catholic, Apostolic Church."
Paul's fellowship with Peter and with James was
cordial and endeared. But to hold the hand of John,
"But when Cephas came to Antioch, I resisted him to the face, because he stood condemned. For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing them that were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that even Barnabas was carried away with their dissimulation. But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Cephas before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest as do the Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, how compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? We being Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, yet knowing that a man is not justified by works of law, but only through faith in Jesus Christ, even we believed on Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the law: because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. But if, while we sought to be justified in Christ, we ourselves also were found sinners, is Christ a minister of sin? God forbid. For if I build up again those things which I destroyed, I prove myself a transgressor."—Gal. ii. 11-18.
But for the present the Judaizing faction had
received a check. It does not appear that the party
ever again insisted on circumcision as a thing essential
to salvation for the Gentiles. The utterances of Peter
and James at the Council, and the circular addressed
therefrom to the Gentile Churches, rendered this
impossible. The Legalists made a change of front;
and adopted a subtler and seemingly more moderate
policy. They now preached circumcision as the prerogative
of the Jew within the Church, and as a counsel
of perfection for the Gentile believer in Christ (ch. iii. 3).
To quote the rescript of
It is against this newer type of Judaistic teaching
that our Epistle is directed.
This encounter did not, we think, take place on the
return of Paul and Barnabas from the Council. The
compact of Jerusalem secured to the Church a few
years of rest from the Judaistic agitation. The
Thessalonian Epistles, written in 52 or 53 A.D., go to
show, not only that the Churches of Macedonia were
free from the legalist contention, but that it did not at
this period occupy the Apostle's mind. Judas Barsabbas
and Silas—not Peter—accompanied the Gentile
missionaries in returning to Antioch; and Luke
gives, in
When, therefore, did "Cephas come down to
Antioch?" The Galatians evidently knew. The
Judaizers had given their account of the matter, to
Paul's disadvantage. Perhaps he had referred to it
himself on his last visit to Galatia, when we know he
spoke explicitly and strongly against the Circumcisionists
(ch. i. 9). Just before his arrival in Galatia
on this occasion he had "spent some time" at Antioch
( In his L'apôtre Paul: esquisse d'une histoire de sa pensée, an
admirable work, to which the writer is under great obligation.
The "troublers" in this instance were "certain from
James." Like the "false brethren" See Chapter VII. pp. 109, 110.
These agents addressed themselves in the first
The withdrawal of Peter and the other Jews at
Antioch from the table of the Gentiles virtually
"compelled" the latter "to Judaize." Not that the
Jewish Apostle had this intention in his mind. He
was made the tool of designing men. By "separating
himself" he virtually said to every uncircumcised
brother, "Stand by thyself, I am holier than thou."
Legal conformity on the part of the Gentiles was made
the condition of their communion with Jewish Christians—a
demand simply fatal to Christianity. It re-established
the principle of salvation by works in a
more invidious form. To supplement the righteousness
of faith by that of law, meant to supplant it. To admit
It had been Peter's previous rule, since the vision of Joppa, to lay aside Jewish scruples of diet and to live in free intercourse with Gentile brethren. He "was wont to eat with the Gentiles. Though a born Jew, he lived in Gentile fashion"—words unmistakably describing Peter's general habit in such circumstances. This Gentile conformity of Peter was a fact of no small moment for the Galatian readers. It contravenes the assertion of a radical divergence between Petrine and Pauline Christianity, whether made by Ebionites or Baurians.
The Jewish Apostle's present conduct was an act of "dissimulation." He was belying his known convictions, publicly expressed and acted on for years. Paul's challenge assumes that his fellow-Apostle is acting insincerely. And this assumption is explained by the account furnished in the Acts of the Apostles respecting Peter's earlier relations with Gentile Christianity (ch. x. 1-xi. 18; xv. 6-11). The strength of Paul's case lay in the conscience of Peter himself. The conflict at Antioch, so often appealed to in proof of the rooted opposition between the two Apostles, in reality gives evidence to the contrary effect. Here the maxim strictly applies, Exceptio probat regulam.
Peter's lapse is quite intelligible. No man who
figures in the New Testament is better known to us.
Honest, impulsive, ready of speech, full of contagious
enthusiasm, brave as a lion, firm as a rock against open
enemies, he possessed in a high degree the qualities
which mark out a leader of men. He was of the stuff
of which Christ makes His missionary heroes. But
there was a strain of weakness in Peter's nature. He
was pliable. He was too much at the mercy of surroundings.
His denial of Jesus set this native fault
in a light terribly vivid and humiliating. It was an act
of "dissimulation." In his soul there was a fervent
love to Christ. His zeal had brought him to the place
of danger. But for the moment he was alone. Public
opinion was all against him. A panic fear seized his brave
heart. He forgot himself; he denied the Master whom
he loved more than life. His courage had failed; never
his faith. "Turned back again" from his coward flight,
Peter had indeed "strengthened his brethren" (
And yet, after all this lapse of time, and in the midst of so glorious a career, the old, miserable weakness betrays him once more. How admonitory is the lesson! The sore long since healed over, the infirmity of nature out of which we seemed to have been completely trained, may yet break out again, to our shame and undoing. Had Peter for a moment forgotten the sorrowful warning of Gethsemane? Be it ours to "watch and pray, lest we enter into temptation."
We have reason to believe that, if Peter rashly erred, he freely acknowledged his error, and honoured his reprover. Both the Epistles that bear his name, in different ways, testify to the high value which their author set upon the teaching of "our beloved brother Paul." Tradition places the two men at Rome side by side in their last days; as though even in their death these glorious Apostles should not be divided, despite the attempts of faction and mistrust to separate them.
Few incidents exhibit more strongly than this the
grievous consequences that may ensue from a seemingly
trivial moral error. It looked a little thing that Peter
should prefer to take his meals away from Gentile
company. And yet, as Paul tells him, his withdrawal
was a virtual rejection of the Gospel, and imperilled
the most vital interests of Christianity. By this act
the Jewish Apostle gave a handle to the adversaries
of the Church which they have used for generations
and for ages afterwards. The dispute which it occassioned
could never be forgotten. In the second century
it still drew down on Paul the bitter reproaches of the
Judaizing faction. And in our own day the rationalistic
critics have been able to turn it to marvellous account.
It supplies the corner-stone of their "scientific reconstruction"
of Biblical theology. The entire theory of
Baur is evolved out of Peter's blunder. Let it be
granted that Peter in yielding to the "certain from
James" followed his genuine convictions and the tradition
of Jewish Christianity, and we see at once how
deep a gulf lay between Paul and the Primitive Church.
All that Paul argues in the subsequent discussion only
tends, in this case, to make the breach more visible.
This false step of Peter is the thing that chiefly
lends a colour to the theory in question, with all the
Paul's rebuke of his brother Apostle extends to the conclusion of the chapter. Some interpreters cut it short at the end of ver. 14; others at ver. 16; others again at ver. 18. But the address is consecutive and germane to the occasion throughout. Paul does not, to be sure, give a verbatim report, but the substance of what he said, and in a form suited to his readers. The narrative is an admirable prelude to the argument of chap. iii. It forms the transition from the historical to the polemical part of the Epistle, from the Apostle's personal to his doctrinal apology. The condensed form of the speech makes its interpretation difficult and much contested. We shall in the remainder of this Chapter trace the general course of Paul's reproof, proposing in the following Chapter to deal more fully with its doctrinal contents.
I. In the first place, Paul taxes the Jewish Apostle with insincerity and unfaithfulness toward the gospel. "I saw," he says, "that they were not holding a straight course, according to the truth of the gospel."
It is a moral, not a doctrinal aberration, that Paul
lays at the door of Cephas and Barnabas. They did not
hold a different creed from himself; they were disloyal
to the common creed. They swerved from the path of
rectitude in which they had walked hitherto. They
had regard no longer to "the truth of the gospel"—the
supreme consideration of the servant of Christ—but
to the favour of men, to the public opinion of
Jerusalem. "What will be said of us there?" they
whispered to each other, "if these messengers of James
report that we are discarding the sacred customs, and
This withdrawal of the Jews from the common fellowship at Antioch was a public matter. It was an injury to the whole Gentile-Christian community. If the reproof was to be salutary, it must be equally public and explicit. The offence was notorious. Every one deplored it, except those who shared it, or profited by it. Cephas "stood condemned." And yet his influence and the reverence felt toward him were so great, that no one dared to put this condemnation into words. His sanction was of itself enough to give to this sudden recrudescence of Jewish bigotry the force of authoritative usage. "The truth of the gospel" was again in jeopardy. Once more Paul's intervention foiled the attempts of the Judaizers and saved Gentile liberties. And this time he stood quite alone. Even the faithful Barnabas deserted him. But what mattered that, if Christ and truth were on his side? Amicus Cephas, amicus Barnabas; sed magis amicus Veritas. Solitary amid the circle of opposing or dissembling Jews, Paul "withstood" the chief of the Apostles of Jesus "to the face." He rebuked him "before them all."
II. Peter's conduct is reproved by Paul in the light of their common knowledge of salvation in Christ.
Paul is not content with pointing out the inconsistency
of his brother Apostle. He must probe the
matter to the bottom. He will bring Peter's delinquency
to the touchstone of the Gospel, in its fundamental
principles. So he passes in ver. 15 from the outward
to the inward, from the circumstances of Peter's conduct
to the inner world of spiritual consciousness, in �ὰν μὴ has the same partially exceptive force as εἰ μὴ in ch. i. 7,
19. Comp.
Paul makes no doubt that the Jewish Apostle's
experience of salvation corresponded with his own.
Doubtless, in their previous intercourse, and especially
when he first "made acquaintance with Cephas" (ch. i.
18) in Jerusalem, the hearts of the two men had been
opened to each other; and they had found that, although
brought to the knowledge of the truth in different ways,
yet in the essence of the matter—in respect of the
personal conviction of sin, in the yielding up of self-righteousness
and native pride, in the abandonment of
every prop and trust but Jesus Christ—their history
had run the same course, and face answered to face.
Yes, Paul knew that he had an ally in the heart of
his friend. He was not fighting as one that beateth
the air, not making a rhetorical flourish, or a parade
of some favourite doctrine of his own; he appealed
from Peter dissembling to Peter faithful and consistent.
Peter's dissimulation was a return to the Judaic ground
of legal righteousness. By refusing to eat with uncircumcised
men, he affirmed implicitly that, though
believers in Christ, they were still to him "common and
unclean," that the Mosaic rites imparted a higher
sanctity than the righteousness of faith. Now the
III. Paul is met at this point by the stock objection to the doctrine of salvation by faith—an objection brought forward in the dispute at Antioch not, we should imagine, by Peter himself, but by the Judaistic advocates. To renounce legal righteousness was in effect, they urged, to promote sin—nay, to make Christ Himself a minister of sin (ver. 17).
Paul retorts the charge on those who make it. They
promote sin, he declares, who set up legal righteousness
again (ver. 18). The objection is stated and met in the
form of question and answer, as in
We must not overlook the close verbal connection
of these verses with the two last. The phrase "seeking
to be justified in Christ" carries us back to the time
when the two Apostles, self-condemned sinners,
severally sought and found a new ground of righteousness
in Him. Now when Peter and Paul did this, For this emphatic found, describing a process of moral conviction
and inward discovery, comp.
The Apostle repels this inference with the indignant
μὴ γένοιτο, Far be it! His reply is indicated by the
very form in which he puts the question: "If we were
found sinners" (Christ did not make us such). "The
complaint was this," as Calvin finely says: "Has
Christ therefore come to take away from us the righteousness
of the Law, to make us polluted who were
holy? Nay, Paul says;—he repels the blasphemy with Commentarii, in loc.
Ver. 18 throws back the charge of promoting sin
upon the Legalist. It is the counterpart, not of ver. 19,
but rather of ver. 17. The "transgressor" is the sinner
in a heightened and more specific sense, one who
breaks known and admitted law. See Grimm's Lexicon, or Trench's N. T. Synonyms, on this word.
Comp. ch. iii. 19; The I of this sentence is quite indefinite. On the other hand
ver. 19, with its emphatic �γώ γά�, brings us into a new vein of thought. Comp. ch. iii. 10-12, 19; This verb has, as Schott suggests, a tinge of irony.
IV. The conviction of Peter is now complete. From the sad bondage to which the Jewish Apostle, by his compliance with the Judaizers, was preparing to submit himself, the Apostle turns to his own joyous sense of deliverance (vv. 19-21). Those who resort to legalism, he has said, ensure their own condemnation. It is, on the other hand, by an entire surrender to Christ, by realizing the import of His death, that we learn to "live unto God." So Paul had proved it. At this moment he is conscious of a union with the crucified and living Saviour, which lifts him above the curse of the law, above the power of sin. To revert to the Judaistic state, to dream any more of earning righteousness by legal conformity, is a thing for him inconceivable. It would be to make void the cross of Christ!
And it was the Law itself that first impelled Paul
"For I through law died unto law, that I might live unto God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself up for me. I do not make void the grace of God: for if righteousness is through law, then Christ died for nought"—Gal. ii. 19-21.
Paul is compelled to say all this about himself. The vindication of his ministry is forced from him by the calumnies of false brethren. From the time of the conference at Jerusalem, and still more since he withstood Peter at Antioch, he had been a mark for the hatred of the Judaizing faction. He was the chief obstacle to their success. Twice he had foiled them, when they counted upon victory. They had now set on foot a systematic agitation against him, with its head-quarters at Jerusalem, carried on under some pretext of sanction from the authorities of the Church there. At Corinth and in Galatia the legalist emissaries had appeared simultaneously; they pursued in the main the same policy, adapting it to the character and disposition of the two Churches, and appealing with no little success to the Jewish predilections common even amongst Gentile believers in Christ.
In this controversy Paul and the gospel he preached
were bound together. "I am set," he says, "for the
defence of the gospel" (
While Paul in ch. i. and ii. is busy with his own Hofmann is so far right when he makes the Apostle turn to the
Galatians in ch. ii. 15, and draws at this point the line between the
historical and doctrinal sections of the Epistle.
I. At the foundation of Paul's theology lies his conception of the grace of God.
Grace is the Apostle's watchword. The word occurs
twice as often in his Epistles as it does in the rest of
the New Testament. Outside the Pauline Luke and
Hebrews, and 1 Peter with its large infusion of Paulinism,
it is exceedingly rare. What is said of χά�ις, applies also to its derivatives, χα�ίζομαι,
κ.τ.λ.
God's grace is not His love alone; it is redeeming
love—love poured out upon the undeserving, love
coming to seek and save the lost, "bringing salvation
to all men" (
Grace in God is therefore the antithesis of sin in
man, counterworking and finally triumphing over it.
Grace belongs to the last Adam as eminently as sin to
the first. The later thoughts of the Apostle on this
theme are expressed in
Being the antagonist of sin, grace comes of necessity
into contrast with the law. Law is intrinsically the
opposer of sin; sin is "lawlessness," with Paul as
much as with John.
While sin is the reply which man's nature makes to
the demands of law, faith is the response elicited by
grace; it is the door of the heart opening to grace.
Grace appears, however, in another class of passages
in Paul's Epistles, of which ch. i. 15, ii. 9 are
examples. To the Divine grace Paul ascribes his
personal salvation and Apostolic call. The revelation
which made him a Christian and an Apostle, was above
II. Side by side with the grace of God, we find in ver. 21 the death of Christ. He sets aside the former, the Apostle argues, who by admitting legal righteousness nullifies the latter.
While grace embodies Paul's fundamental conception of the Divine character, the death of Christ is the fundamental fact in which that character manifests itself. So the cross becomes the centre of Paul's theology. But it was, in the first place, the basis of his personal life. "Faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me," is the foundation of "the life he now lives in the flesh."
Here lay the stumbling-block of Judaism. Theocratic
pride, Pharisaic tradition, could not, as we say, get
over it. A crucified Messiah! How revolting the bare
idea. But when, as in Paul's case, Judaistic pride did
surmount this huge scandal and in spite of the offence
of the cross arrive at faith in Jesus, it was at the cost
of a severe fall. It was broken in pieces,—destroyed
once and for ever. With the elder Apostles the change
had been more gradual; they were never steeped in
Judaism as Saul was. For him to accept the faith of
Jesus was a revolution the most complete and drastic
possible. As a Judaist, the preaching of the cross
was an outrage on his faith and his Messianic hopes;
now it was that which most of all subdued and
entranced him. Its power was extreme, whether to
attract or repel. The more he had loathed and mocked
at it before, the more he is bound henceforth to exalt
the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. A proof of the
Divine anger against the Nazarene he had once deemed
For Paul therefore the death of Christ imported the end of Judaism. "I died to law," he writes,—"I am crucified with Christ." Once understanding what this death meant, and realising his own relation to it, on every account it was impossible to go back to Legalism. The cross barred all return. The law that put Him, the sinless One, to death, could give no life to sinful men. The Judaism that pronounced His doom, doomed itself. Who would make peace with it over the Saviour's blood? From the moment that Paul knew the truth about the death of Jesus, he had done with Judaism for ever. Henceforth he knew nothing—cherished no belief or sentiment, acknowledged no maxim, no tradition, which did not conform itself to His death. The world to which he had belonged died, self-slain, when it slew Him. From Christ's grave a new world was rising, for which alone Paul lived.
But why should the grace of God take expression in
a fact so appalling as Christ's death? What has
death to do with grace? It is the legal penalty of sin.
The conjunction of sin and death pervades the teaching
of Scripture, and is a principle fixed in the conscience
of mankind. Death, as man knows it, is the inevitable
consequence and the universal witness of his transgression.
He "carries about in his mortality the
testimony that God is angry with the wicked every
day" (Augustine). The death of Jesus Christ cannot
be taken out of this category. He died a sinner's
death. He bore the penalty of guilt. The prophetic
antecedents of Calvary, the train of circumstances
connected with it, His own explanations in chief—are
The resurrection of Christ is, in Paul's thought, the
other side of His death. They constitute one event,
the obverse and reverse of the same reality. For Paul,
as for the first Apostles, the resurrection of Jesus gave
to His death an aspect wholly different from that it
previously wore. But the transformation wrought in
their minds during the "forty days," in his case came
about in a single moment, and began from a different
starting-point. Instead of being the merited punishment
III. This brings us to the thought of the union of the believer with Christ in death and life, which is expressed in terms of peculiar emphasis and distinctness in ver. 20. "With Christ I have been crucified; and I live no longer; it is Christ that lives in me. My earthly life is governed by faith in Him who loved me and died for me." Christ and Paul are one. When Christ died, Paul's former self died with Him. Now it is the Spirit of Christ in heaven that lives within Paul's body here on earth.
This union is first of all a communion with the dying
Saviour. Paul does not think of the sacrifice of Calvary
as something merely accomplished for him, outside
himself, by a legal arrangement in which one person
Faith is the link between the past, objective sacrifice,
and the present, subjective apprehension of it, by which Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 65, 6. Dr. Pfleiderer's delicate and
sympathetic interpretation of Paul's teaching (in these Lectures, and
still more in his Paulinism) has made all students of the Apostle his
debtors, however much they may quarrel with his historical criticism.
Partaking the death of Christ, Paul has come to
share in His risen life. On the cross he owned his
Saviour—owned His wounds, His shame, His agony
of death, and felt himself therein shamed, wounded,
slain to death. Thus joined to his Redeemer, as by
the nails that fastened Him to the tree, Paul is carried
Jesus Christ alone, "the Lord of the Spirit" has risen from that sepulchre,—has risen in the spirit of Paul. "If any one should come to Paul's doors and ask, Who lives here? he would answer, Not Saul of Tarsus, but Jesus Christ lives in this body of mine." In this appropriation of the death and rising of the Lord Jesus, this interpenetration of the spirit of Paul and that of Christ, there are three stages corresponding to the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Eastertide. "Christ died for our sins; He was buried; He rose again the third day:" so, by consequence, "I am crucified with Christ; no longer do I live; Christ liveth in me."
This mystic union of the soul and its Saviour bears
fruit in the activities of outward life. Faith is no mere
abstract and contemplative affection; but a working
energy, dominating and directing all our human faculties.
It makes even the flesh its instrument, which
defied the law of God, and betrayed the man to the
bondage of sin and death. There is a note of triumph
in the words,—"the life I now live in the flesh, I live in
faith!" The impossible has been accomplished. "The
body of death" is possessed by the Spirit of life in
Christ Jesus (
Paul's entire theology of Redemption is contained Ch. iii. 14; iv. 6, 7; v. 5; 1 Cor., vi. 17, 19; Ch. iii. 28;
In all these vital truths Paul's gospel was traversed by
the Legalism countenanced by Peter at Antioch. The
Judaistic doctrine struck directly, if not avowedly, at the
cross, whose reproach its promoters sought to escape.
This charge is the climax of the Apostle's contention
against Peter, and the starting-point of his expostulation
And so, on the one hand, Legalism impugns
the grace of God. It puts human relations to God
on the footing of a debtor and creditor account;
it claims for man a ground for boasting in himself
(
On the other hand, and by the same necessity,
Legalism is fatal to the spiritual life in man. Whilst it
clouds the Divine character, it dwarfs and petrifies the
human. What becomes of the sublime mystery of the
life hid with Christ in God, if its existence is made
contingent on circumcision and ritual performance?
To men who put "meat and drink" on a level with
"righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost,"
"O foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified? This only would I learn from you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now perfected in the flesh? Did ye suffer so many things in vain? if it be indeed in vain. He therefore that supplieth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?"—Gal. iii. 1-5.
Here also the indignation so powerfully expressed
in the Introduction, breaks forth again, directed this
This chapter stands, nevertheless, in close connection
of thought with the foregoing. The Apostle's doctrine
is grounded in historical fact and personal experience.
The theological argument has behind it the weight
of his proved Apostleship. The Judaistic dispute at
Antioch, in particular, bears immediately on the subject-matter
of the third chapter. Peter's vacillation had its
counterpart in the defection of the Galatians. The
reproof and refutation which the elder Apostle brought
upon himself, Paul's readers must have felt, touched
them very nearly. In the crafty intriguers who made
mischief at Antioch, they could see the image of the
Judaists who had come into their midst. Above all,
it was the cross which Cephas had dishonoured, whose
efficacy he had virtually denied. His act of dissimulation,
pushed to its issue, nullified the death of Christ.
This is the gravamen of Paul's impeachment. And
it is the foundation of all his complaints against the
Galatians. Round this centre the conflict is waged.
By its tendency to enhance or diminish the glory of
I. Here then was the beginning of their folly. The Galatians forgot their Saviour's cross.
This was the first step in their backsliding. Had their eyes continued to be fixed on Calvary, the Legalists would have argued and cajoled in vain. Let the cross of Christ once lose its spell for us, let its influence fail to hold and rule the soul, and we are at the mercy of every wind of doctrine. We are like sailors in a dark night on a perilous coast, who have lost sight of the lighthouse beacon. Our Christianity will go to pieces. If Christ crucified should cease to be its sovereign attraction, from that moment the Church is doomed.
This forgetfulness of the cross on the part of the
Galatians is the more astonishing to Paul, because at
first they had so vividly realised its power, and the
scene of Calvary, as Paul depicted it, The verb π�οεγ�άφη (openly set forth) probably means painted up
rather than placarded. This more vivid meaning belongs to γ�άφω,
and there is no sufficient reason why it should not attach to π�ο-γ�άφω.
It is entirely in place here. "Jesus Christ crucified" is not an announcement
to be made, but an object to be delineated.
Has all this passed away? Have the Galatians forgotten
the shame, the glory of that hour—the tears
of penitence, the cries of joy and gratitude which the
vision of the cross drew from their souls, the new
creation it had wrought within them, the ardour of spirit
and high resolve with which they pledged themselves
to Christ's service? Was the influence of that transforming
experience to prove no more enduring than
the morning cloud and early dew? Foolish Galatians!
Had they not the wit to see that the teaching of the
The ancient belief alluded to in the word the Apostle
uses here, On βασκαίνω see the note in Lightfoot's Commentary in loc.; also
Grimm's N. T. Lexicon. "The Scripture calleth envy an 'evil eye;' ...
so there still seemeth to be acknowledged in the act of envy an ejaculation
or irradiation of the eye. Envy hath in it something of witchcraft....
It is the proper attribute of the Devil, who is called 'The envious
man, that soweth tares among the wheat by night.'"—(Lord Bacon:
Essay ix.) Comp.
II. Losing sight of the cross of Christ, the Galatians were furthermore rejecting the Holy Spirit of God.
This heavy reproach the Apostles urges upon his
The Apostle wished the Galatians to test the competing
doctrines by their effects. The Spirit of God
had put His seal on the Apostle's teaching, and on
the faith of his hearers. Did any such manifestation
accompany the preaching of the Legalist? That is all
he wants to know. His cause must stand or fall by
"the demonstration of the Spirit." By "signs and
wonders," and diverse gifts of the Holy Spirit, God
was wont to "bear witness with" the ministers and
witnesses of Jesus Christ (
"He, the Spirit of truth, shall testify of Me," Christ
had said; and so John, at the end of the Apostolic age:
"It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the
Spirit is truth." When the Galatians accepted the
message of the cross proclaimed by Paul's lips, "the
Holy Spirit fell" on them, as on the Jewish Church at
There were men in the Galatian Churches on whom
the baptism of the Spirit conferred besides miraculous
charismata, superhuman powers of insight and of healing.
These gifts God continued to "minister amongst"
them (God is unquestionably the agent in ver. 5). Paul
asks them to observe on what conditions, and to whom,
these extraordinary gifts are distributed. For the "receiving
of the Spirit" was an infallible sign of true
Christian faith. This was the very proof which in the
first instance had convinced Peter and the Judean
Church that it was God's will to save the Gentiles,
independently of the Mosaic law (
Receiving the Spirit, the Galatian believers knew
that they were the sons of God. "God sent forth the
Spirit of His Son into their hearts, crying, Abba, Father"
(ch. iv. 6, 7). When Paul speaks of "receiving the
Spirit," it is this that he thinks of most of all. The
miraculous phenomena attending His visitations were
facts of vast importance; and their occurrence is one
of the historical certainties of the Apostolic age. They
were "signs," conspicuous, impressive, indispensable
at the time—monuments set up for all time. But they
were in their nature variable and temporary. There
No legal condition was laid down at this beginning
of their Christian life; no "work" of any kind interposed
between the belief of the heart and the conscious
reception of the new life in Christ. Even their baptism,
significant and memorable as it was, had not been
required as in itself a precondition of salvation. Sometimes Ch. iii. 26, 27;
And so they must continue. To begin in the Spirit, and then look for perfection to the flesh, to suppose that the work of faith and love was to be consummated by Pharisaic ordinances, that Moses could lead them higher than Christ, and circumcision effect for them what the power of the Holy Ghost failed to do—this was the height of unreason. "Are you so senseless?" the Apostle asks.
He dwells on this absurdity, pressing home his
expostulation with an emphasis that shows he is
touching the centre of the controversy between himself
and the Judaizers. They admitted, as we have shown
in Chapter IX., that Gentiles might enter the kingdom
of God through faith and by the baptism of the Spirit.
This was settled at the Council of Jerusalem. Without
a formal acceptance of this evangelical principle, we do
not see how the Legalists could again have found entrance
into Gentile Christian Churches, much less have
Such was the style of "persuasion" employed by
the Judaizers. It was well calculated to deceive Jewish
believers, even those best affected to their Gentile
brethren. It appeared to maintain the prescriptive
rights of Judaism and to satisfy legitimate national
pride, without excluding the Gentiles from the fold of
Christ. Nor is it difficult to understand the spell which
the circumcisionist doctrine exerted over susceptible
Gentile minds, after some years of Christian training,
of familiarity with the Old Testament and the early
history of Israel. Who is there that does not feel the
charm of ancient memories and illustrious names?
Many a noble mind is at this present time "bewitched,"
many a gifted and pious spirit is "carried away" by
influences precisely similar. Apostolical succession, patristic
usage, catholic tradition, the authority of the Church—what
words of power are these! How wilful and
arbitrary it appears to rely upon any present experience
of the grace of God, upon one's own reading
The men of tradition are well content that we should
"begin in the Spirit," provided they may have the
finishing of our faith. To prey upon the Pauline
Churches is their ancient and natural habit. An evangelical
beginning is too often followed by a ritualistic
ending. And Paul is ever begetting spiritual children,
to see himself robbed of them by these bewitching
Judaizers. "O foolish Galatians," he seems still to be
saying, What is it that charms you so much in all this
ritual and externalism? Does it bring you nearer to
the cross of Christ? Does it give you more of His
Spirit? Is it a spiritual satisfaction that you find in
these works of Church law, these priestly ordinances
and performances? How can the sons of God return
The conflict which this Epistle signalised is one
that has never ceased. Its elements belong to human
nature. It is the contest between the religion of the
Spirit and that of the letter, between the spontaneity
of personal faith and the rights of usage and prescription.
The history of the Church is largely the
record of this incessant struggle. In every Christian
community, in every earnest and devout spirit, it is
repeated in some new phase. When the Fathers of the
Church in the second and third centuries began to write
about "the new law" and to identify the Christian
ministry with the Aaronic priesthood, it was evident
that Legalism was regaining its ascendancy. Already
the foundations were laid of the Catholic Church-system,
which culminated in the Papacy of Rome.
What Paul's opponents sought to do by means of
circumcision and Jewish prerogatives, that the Catholic
legalists have done, on a larger scale, through the
claims of the priesthood and the sacramental offices.
The spiritual functions of the private Christian, one
after another, were usurped or carelessly abandoned.
Step by step the hierarchy interposed itself between
Christ and His people's souls, till its mediation became
the sole channel and organ of the Holy Spirit's influence.
So it has come to pass, by a strange irony of
history, that under the forms of Pauline doctrine and
in the name of the Apostle of the Gentiles joined with
that of Peter, catholic Christendom, delivered by him
from the Jewish yoke, has been entangled in a bondage
in some respects even heavier and more repressive.
If tradition and prescription are to regulate our
III. Paul said he had but one question to ask his readers, that which we have already discussed. And yet he does put to them, by way of parenthesis, another (ver. 4), suggested by what he has already called to mind, touching the beginning of their Christian course: "Have ye suffered so many things in vain?" Their folly was the greater in that it threatened to deprive them of the fruit of their past sufferings in the cause of Christ.
The Apostle does not say this without a touch of
softened feeling. Remembering the trials these Galatians
had formerly endured, the sacrifices they had made in
accepting the gospel, he cannot bear to think of their
apostasy. Hope breaks through his fear, grief passes
into tenderness as he adds, "If it be indeed in vain."
The link of reminiscence connecting vv. 3 and 4 is the
same as that we find in Comp.
We need not seek for any peculiar cause of these
sufferings; nor wonder that the Apostle does not
mention them elsewhere. Every infant Church had
its baptism of persecution. No one could come out
of heathen society and espouse the cause of Jesus,
without making himself a mark for ridicule and violence,
without the rupture of family and public ties, and many
painful sacrifices. The hatred of Paul's fellow-countrymen
towards him was an additional cause of persecution
to the Churches he had founded. They were
And now were they going to surrender the faith won by such a struggle? Would they let themselves be cheated of blessings which had cost them so dear? "So many things," he asks, "did you suffer in vain?" He will not believe it. He cannot think that this brave beginning will have so mean an ending. If "God counts them worthy of His kingdom for which they suffered," let them not deem themselves unworthy. Surely they have not escaped from the tyranny of heathenism, in order to yield up their liberties to Jewish intrigue, to the cozenage of false brethren who seek to exalt themselves at their expense (ch. ii. 4; iv. 17; vi. 12, 13). Will flattery beguile from them the treasure to which persecution had made them cling the more closely?
Too often, alas, the Galatian defection is repeated. The generous devotion of youth is followed by the lethargy and formalism of a prosperous age; and the man who at twenty-five was a pattern of godly zeal, at fifty is a finished worldling. The Christ whom he adored, the cross at which he bowed in those early days—he seldom thinks of them now. "I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals; how thou wentest after Me in the wilderness." Success has spoiled him. The world's glamour has bewitched him. He bids fair to "end in the flesh."
In a broader sense, the Apostle's question addresses
"O foolish Galatians," Paul in that case might well say to us again!
"Even as Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned unto him for righteousness. Know therefore that they which be of faith, the same are sons of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God justifieth the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all the nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with the faithful Abraham. For as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one which continueth not in all things that are written in the book of the law, to do them. Now that no man is justified in the law in the sight of God, is evident: for, The righteous shall live by faith; and the law is not of faith; but, He that doeth them shall live in them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: that upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith."—Gal. iii. 6-14.
In this mode of salvation, the Apostle goes on to
show, there was after all nothing new. The righteousness
of faith is more ancient than legalism. It is as
old as Abraham. His religion rested on this ground.
Thus the two standing types of religion, the two ways by which men seek salvation, are put in contrast with each other—faith with its blessing, law with its curse. The former is the path on which the Galatians had entered, under the guidance of Paul; the latter, that to which the Judaic teachers were leading them. So far the two principles stand only in antagonism. The antinomy will be resolved in the latter part of the chapter.
But why does Paul make so much of the faith of
Abraham? Not only because it furnished him with a
telling illustration, or because the words of
The Apostle holds, as strongly as any Judaist, that the promise belongs to the children of Abraham. But what makes a son of Abraham? "Birth, true Jewish blood, of course," replied the Judaist. The Gentile, in his view, could only come into a share of the heritage by receiving circumcision, the mark of legal adoption and incorporation. Paul answers this question by raising another. What was it that brought Abraham his blessing? To what did he owe his righteousness? It was faith: so Scripture declares—"Abraham believed God." Righteousness, covenant, promise, blessing—all turned upon this. And the true sons of Abraham are those who are like him: "Know then that the men of faith, these are Abraham's sons." This declaration is a blow, launched with studied effect full in the face of Jewish privilege. Only a Pharisee, only a Rabbi, knew how to wound in this fashion. Like the words of Stephen's defence, such sentences as these stung Judaic pride to the quick. No wonder that his fellow-countrymen, in their fierce fanaticism of race, pursued Paul with burning hate and set a mark upon his life.
But the identity of Abraham's blessing with that
enjoyed by Gentile Christians is not left to rest on mere
I. What then, we ask, was the nature of Abraham's
blessing? In its essence, it was righteousness. The
"blessing" of vv. 9 and 14 is synonymous with the "justification"
of vv. 6 and 8, embracing with it all its fruits
Paul and the Legalists agreed in designating righteousness
before God man's chief good. But they and he
intended different things by it. Nay, Paul's conception
of righteousness, it is said, differed radically from that
of the Old Testament, and even of his companion writers
in the New Testament. Confessedly, his doctrine
presents this idea under a peculiar aspect. But there
is a spiritual identity, a common basis of truth, in all
the Biblical teaching on this vital subject. Abraham's
righteousness was the state of a man who trustfully
accepts God's word of grace, and is thereby set right
with God, and put in the way of being and doing right
thenceforward. In virtue of his faith, God regarded
and dealt with Abraham as a righteous man. Righteousness
of character springs out of righteousness of standing.
God makes a man righteous by counting him so!
This is the Divine paradox of Justification by Faith.
When the Hebrew author says, "God counted it to
him for righteousness," he does not mean in lieu of
righteousness, as though faith were a substitute for a
righteousness not forthcoming and now rendered
superfluous; but so as to amount to righteousness, with a
view to righteousness. This "reckoning" is the sovereign
act of the Creator, who gives what He demands, "who
maketh alive the dead, and calleth the things that are
not as though they were" (
There is nothing arbitrary, or merely forensic in this
imputation. Faith is, for such a being as man, the
spring of all righteousness before God, the one act of
the soul which is primarily and supremely right. What
The Old Testament deals with the materials of
character, with the qualities and behaviour constituting
a righteous man, more than with the cause or process
that makes him righteous. All the more significant
therefore are such pronouncements as that of Of faith qualifies live in the Hebrew of the prophet, and in the
LXX, also in the quotation of
Into what a life of blessing the righteousness of faith
introduced "faithful Abraham," these Galatian students
of the Old Testament very well knew. Twice
With Abraham's faith, the Gentiles inherit his blessing.
They were not simply blessed in him, through his
faith which received and handed down the blessing,—but
blessed with him. Their righteousness rests on the
same principle as his. Religion reverts to its earlier
purer type. Just as in the Epistle to the Hebrews
Melchizedek's priesthood is adduced as belonging to
a more Christlike order, antecedent to and underlying
the Aaronic; so we find here, beneath the cumbrous
structure of legalism, the evidence of a primitive
religious life, cast in a larger mould, with a happier
style of experience, a piety broader, freer, at once more
spiritual and more human. Reading the story of Abraham,
we witness the bright dawn of faith, its spring-time
II. But if the Galatians are resolved to be under the Law, they must understand what this means. The legal state, Paul declares, instead of the blessing of Abraham, brings with it a curse: "As many as are of law-works, are under a curse."
This the Apostle, in other words, had told Peter at Antioch. He maintained that whoever sets up the law as a ground of salvation, "makes himself a transgressor" (ch. ii. 18); he brings upon himself the misery of having violated law. This is no doubtful contingency. The law in explicit terms pronounces its curse against every man who, binding himself to keep it, yet breaks it in any particular.
The Scripture which Paul quotes to this effect, forms
the conclusion of the commination uttered by the people
of Israel, according to the directions of Moses, from
Mount Ebal, on their entrance into Canaan: "Cursed
is every one that continueth not in all things written
in the book of the law to do them."
This sequence of law and transgression belonged to
Paul's deepest convictions. "The law," he says,
"worketh out wrath" (
What Paul here proves from Scripture, bitter experience had taught him. As the law unfolded itself to his youthful conscience, he approved it as "holy and just and good." He was pledged and resolved to observe it in every point. He must despise himself if he acted otherwise. He strove to be—in the sight of men indeed he was—"touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." If ever a man carried out to the letter the legal requirements, and fulfilled the moralist's ideal, it was Saul of Tarsus. Yet his failure was complete, desperate! While men accounted him a paragon of virtue, he loathed himself; he knew that before God his righteousness was worthless. The "law of sin in his members" defied "the law of his reason," and made its power the more sensible the more it was repressed. The curse thundered by the six tribes from Ebal resounded in his ears. And there was no escape. The grasp of the law was relentless, because it was just, like the grasp of death. Against all that was holiest in it the evil in himself stood up in stark, immitigable opposition. "O wretched man that I am," groans the proud Pharisee, "who shall deliver me!" From this curse Christ had redeemed him. And he would not, if he could help it, have the Galatians expose themselves to it again. On legal principles, there is no safety but in absolute, flawless obedience, such as no man ever has rendered, or ever will. Let them trust the experience of centuries of Jewish bondage.
Verses 11, 12 support the assertion that the Law
issues in condemnation, by a further, negative proof.
The argument is a syllogism, both whose premises are
drawn from the Old Testament. It may be formally
stated thus. Major premise (evangelical maxim): "The
just man lives of faith"
The two paths now lie before us—the Pauline and
the legal method of salvation, the Abrahamic and the
Mosaic scheme of religion. According to the latter,
one begins by keeping so many rules—ethical, ceremonial,
or what not; and after doing this, one expects
to be counted righteous by God. According to the
former, the man begins by an act of self-surrendering
trust in God's word of grace, and God already reckons
him just on that account, without his pretending to
anything in the way of merit for himself. In short,
III. But how pass from this curse to that blessing? How escape from the nemesis of the broken law into the freedom of Abraham's faith? To this question ver. 13 makes answer: "Christ bought us out of the curse of the law, having become a curse for us." Christ's redemption changes the curse into a blessing.
We entered this Epistle under the shadow of the cross. It has been all along the centre of the writer's thought. He has found in it the solution of the terrible problem forced upon him by the law. Law had led him to Christ's cross; laid him in Christ's grave; and there left him, to rise with Christ a new, free man, living henceforth to God (ch. ii. 19-21). So we understand the purpose and the issue of the death of Jesus Christ; now we must look more narrowly at the fact itself.
"Christ became a curse!" Verily the Apostle was
not "seeking to please or persuade men." This
expression throws the scandal of the cross into the
strongest relief. Far from veiling it or apologizing for
it, Paul accentuates this offence. His experience taught
And did not Christ become a curse? Could the fact be denied by any Jew? His death was that of the most abandoned criminals. By the combined verdict of Jew and Gentile, of civil and religious authority, endorsed by the voice of the populace, He was pronounced a malefactor and blasphemer. But this was not all. The hatred and injustice of men are hard to bear; yet many a sensitive man has borne them in a worthy cause without shrinking. It was a darker dread, an infliction far more crushing, that compelled the cry, "My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!" Against the maledictions of men Jesus might surely at the worst have counted on the Father's good pleasure. But even that failed Him. There fell upon His soul the death of death, the very curse of sin—abandonment by God! Men "did esteem Him"—and for the moment He esteemed Himself—"smitten of God." He hung there abhorred of men, forsaken of His God; earth all hate, heaven all blackness to His view. Are the Apostle's words too strong? Delivering up His Son to pass through this baptism, God did in truth make Him a curse for us. By His "determinate counsel" the Almighty set Jesus Christ in the place of condemned sinners, and allowed the curse of this wicked world to claim Him for its victim.
The death that befell Him was chosen as if for the
purpose of declaring Him accursed. The Jewish people
have thus stigmatized Him. They made the Roman
magistrate and the heathen soldiery their instrument in
gibbeting their Messiah. "Shall I crucify your King?"
said Pilate. "Yes," they answered, "crucify Him!" The Hebrew of
This sentence of execration, with its shame freshly
smarting, Paul has seized and twined into a crown of
glory. "Hanged on a tree, crushed with reproach—accursed,
you say, He was, my Lord, my Saviour! It
is true. But the curse He bore was ours. His death,
unmerited by Him, was our ransom-price, endured to
buy us out of our curse of sin and death." This is
the doctrine of the vicarious sacrifice. In speaking of
"ransom" and "redemption," using the terms of the
market, Christ and His Apostles are applying human
language to things in their essence unutterable, things
which we define in their effects rather than in themselves.
"We know, we prophesy, in part." We
know that we were condemned by God's holy law;
that Christ, Himself sinless, came under the law's curse,
and taking the place of sinners, "became sin for us;"
"Christ redeemed us," says the Apostle, thinking questionless of himself and his Jewish kindred, on whom the law weighed so heavily. His redemption was offered "to the Jew first." But not to the Jew alone, nor as a Jew. The time of release had come for all men. "Abraham's blessing" long withheld, was now to be imparted, as it had been promised, to "all the tribes of the earth." In the removal of the legal curse, God comes near to men as in the ancient days. His love is shed abroad; His spirit of sonship dwells in human hearts. In Christ Jesus crucified, risen, reigning—a new world comes into being, which restores and surpasses the promise of the old.
"Brethren, I speak after the manner of men: Though it be but a man's testament, yet when it hath been confirmed, no one maketh it void, or addeth thereto. Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many, but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. Now this I say; A testament confirmed beforehand by God, the law, which came four hundred and thirty years after, doth not disannul, so as to make the promise of none effect. For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no more of promise: but God hath granted it to Abraham by promise."—Gal. iii. 15-18.
But here the Judaist might interpose: "Granting
so much as this, allowing that God covenanted with
Abraham on terms of faith, and that believing Gentiles
are entitled to his blessing, did not God make a second
covenant with Moses, promising further blessings upon
So we are brought to the question of the relation of law and promise, which is the theoretical, as that of Gentile to Jewish Christianity is the practical problem of the Epistle. The remainder of the chapter is occupied with its discussion. This section is the special contribution of the Epistle to Christian theology—a contribution weighty enough of itself to give to it a foremost place amongst the documents of Revelation. Paul has written nothing more masterly. The breadth and subtlety of his reason, his grasp of the spiritual realities underlying the facts of history, are conspicuously manifest in these paragraphs, despite the extreme difficulty and obscurity of certain sentences.
This part of the Epistle is in fact a piece of inspired
historical criticism; it is a magnificent reconstruction of
the course of sacred history. It is Paul's theory of
doctrinal development, condensing into a few pregnant
sentences the rationale of Judaism, explaining the
This passage finds its counterpart in
The Apostle seeks to establish, in the first place, the fixedness of the Abrahamic covenant. This is the main purport of the passage. At the same time, in ver. 16, he brings into view the Object of the covenant, the person designated by it—Christ, its proper Heir. This consideration, though stated here parenthetically, lies at the basis of the settlement made with Abraham; its importance is made manifest by the after course of Paul's exposition.
At this point, where the discussion opens out into its
larger proportions, we observe that the sharp tone of
personal feeling with which the chapter commenced has
disappeared. In ver. 15 the writer drops into a conciliatory
key. He seems to forget the wounded Apostle in
But is it covenant, or testament, that the Apostle
intends here? "I speak after the manner of men,"
he continues; "if the case were that of a man's διαθήκη,
once ratified, no one would set it aside, or add to it." The
presumption is that the word is employed in its accepted,
every-day significance. And that unquestionably was
"testament." It would never occur to an ordinary
Greek reader to interpret the expression otherwise.
Philo and Josephus, the representatives of contemporary
Hellenistic usage, read this term, in the Old Testament,
with the connotation of διαθήκη in current Greek. See the able and convincing elucidation of διαθήκη in Cremer's
Biblico-Theological Lexicon of N.T. Greek.
This aspect of the covenants now becomes their
commanding feature. Our Lord's employment of this
word at the Last Supper gave it the affecting reference
to His death which it has conveyed ever since to the
Christian mind. See
I. Now when a man has made a testament, and it
has been ratified—"proved," as we should say—it
stands good for ever. No one has afterwards any power
Such a testament God gave "to Abraham and his
seed." It was "ratified" (or "confirmed") by the
final attestation made to the patriarch after the
supreme trial of his faith in the sacrifice of Isaac:
"By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, that in
blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying multiply
thy seed as the stars of heaven; ... and in thy seed
shall all the nations of the earth be blessed."
With such Divine asseveration "were the promises
spoken to Abraham, and his seed." This last word
diverts the Apostle's thoughts for a moment, and he
gives a side-glance at the person thus designated in the
terms of the promise. Then he returns to his former
statement, urging it home against the Legalists: "Now
this is what I mean: a testament previously ratified by
God, the Law which dates four hundred and thirty years
later cannot annul, so as to abrogate the Promise" (ver.
17). The bearing of Paul's argument is now perfectly
clear. He is using the promise to Abraham to overthrow
the supremacy of the Mosaic law. The Promise
was, he says, the prior settlement. No subsequent
transaction could invalidate it or disqualify those
When a man amongst ourselves bequeaths his property, and his will is publicly attested, its directions are scrupulously observed; to tamper with them is a crime. Shall we have less respect to this Divine settlement, this venerable charter of human salvation? You say, The Law of Moses has its rights: it must be taken into account as well as the Promise to Abraham. True; but it has no power to cancel or restrict the Promise, older by four centuries and a half. The later must be adjusted to the earlier dispensation, the Law interpreted by the Promise. God has not made two testaments—the one solemnly committed to the faith and hope of mankind, only to be retracted and substituted by something of a different stamp. He could not thus stultify Himself. And we must not apply the Mosaic enactments, addressed to a single people, in such a way as to neutralise the original provisions made for the race at large. Our human instincts of good faith, our reverence for public compacts and established rights, forbid our allowing the Law of Moses to trench upon the inheritance assured to mankind in the Covenant of Abraham.
This contradiction necessarily arises if the Law is
put on a level with the Promise. To read the Law as
a continuation of the older instrument is virtually to
efface the latter, to "make the promise of none effect."
The two institutes proceed on opposite principles. "If
the inheritance is of law, it is no longer of promise"
(ver. 18). Law prescribes certain things to be done,
Its permanence is emphasized by the tense of the
verb relating to it. The Greek perfect describes settled
facts, actions or events that carry with them finality.
Accordingly we read in vv. 15 and 17 of "a ratified
covenant"—one that stands ratified. In ver. 18, "God
hath granted it to Abraham"—a grace never to be
recalled. Again (ver. 19), "the seed to whom the
promise hath been made"—once for all. A perfect
participle is used of the Law in ver. 17 (γεγονώς), for
it is a fact of abiding significance that it was so much
later than the Promise; and in ver. 24, "the Law hath
been our tutor,"—its work in that respect is an enduring
benefit. Otherwise, the verbs relating to Mosaism
in this context are past in tense, describing what is
now matter of history, a course of events that has come
and gone. Meanwhile the Promise remains, an immovable
certainty, a settlement never to be disturbed.
The emphatic position of ὁ Θεός (ver. 18), at the very
end of the paragraph, serves to heighten this effect. Comp.
Paul's chronology in ver. 17 has been called in
question. We are not much concerned to defend it.
Whether Abraham preceded Moses by four hundred and
thirty years, as the Septuagint and the Samaritan text
of We gain nothing, and we may lose much, in "trying to settle
questions of Old Testament historical criticism by casual allusions in
the New Testament." (See Mr. Beet's sensible observations, in his Commentary
ad loc.)
II. Ver. 16 remains for our consideration. In proving the steadfastness of the covenant with Abraham, the Apostle at the same time directs our attention to the Person designated by it, to whom its fulfilment was guaranteed. "To Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed—'to thy seed,' which is Christ."
This identification the Judaist would not question. He made no doubt that the Messiah was the legatee of the testament, "the seed to whom it hath been promised." Whatever partial and germinant fulfilments the Promise had received, it is on Christ in chief that the inheritance of Israel devolves. In its true and full intent, this promise, like all predictions of the triumph of God's kingdom, was understood to be waiting for His advent.
The fact that this Promise looked to Christ, lends additional force to the Apostle's assertion of its indelibility. The words "unto Christ," which were inserted in the text of ver. 17 at an early time, are a correct gloss. The covenant did not lie between God and Abraham alone. It embraced Abraham's descendants in their unity, culminating in Christ. It looked down the stream of time to the last ages. Abraham was its starting-point; Christ its goal. "To thee—and to thy seed:" these words span the gulf of two thousand years, and overarch the Mosaic dispensation. So that the covenant vouchsafed to Abraham placed him, even at that distance of time, in close personal relationship with the Saviour of mankind. No wonder that it was so evangelical in its terms, and brought the patriarch an experience of religion which anticipated the privileges of Christian faith. God's covenant with Abraham, being in effect His covenant with mankind in Christ, stands both first and last. The Mosaic economy holds a second and subsidiary place in the scheme of Revelation.
The reason the Apostle gives for reading Christ
into the promise is certainly peculiar. He has been
taxed with false exegesis, with "rabbinical hair-splitting"
and the like. Here, it is said, is a fine
example of the art, familiar to theologians, of torturing Ch. iv. 21-31;
Paul's interpretation of the Promise has abundant
analogies. All great principles of human history tend to
embody themselves in some "chosen seed." They find
at last their true heir, the one man destined to be their
fulfilment. Moses, David, Paul; Socrates and Alexander;
Shakespere, Newton, are examples of this. The
work that such men do belongs to themselves. Had
any promise assured the world of the gifts to be
bestowed through them, in each case one might have
said beforehand, It will have to be, "Not as of many,
but as of one." It is not multitudes, but men that rule
the world. "By one man sin entered into the world:
we shall reign in life through the one Jesus Christ."
From the first words of hope given to the repentant
pair banished from Eden, down to the latest predictions
of the Coming One, the Promise became at every
stage more determinate and individualising. The
finger of prophecy pointed with increasing distinctness,
now from this side, now from that, to the veiled form
of the Chosen of God—"the seed of the woman," the
Notwithstanding, the Promise had and has a generic
application, attending its personal accomplishment.
"Salvation is of the Jews." Christ belongs "to the
Jew first." Israel was raised up and consecrated to
be the trustee of the Promise given to the world
through Abraham. The vocation of this gifted race,
the secret of its indestructible vitality, lies in its
relationship to Jesus Christ. They are "His own,"
though they "received Him not." Apart from Him,
Israel is nothing to the world—nothing but a witness
against itself. Premising its essential fulfilment in
Christ, Paul still reserves for his own people their
peculiar share in the Testament of Abraham—not a
place of exclusive privilege, but of richer honour and
larger influence. "Hath God cast away His people?"
he asks: "Nay indeed. For I also am an Israelite, of
the seed of Abraham." So that, after all, it is something
to be of Abraham's children by nature. Despite
his hostility to Judaism, the Apostle claims for the
Jewish race a special office in the dispensation of the
Gospel, in the working out of God's ultimate designs
Paul is not alone in his insistence on the relation
of Christ to Abraham. It is announced in the first
sentence of the New Testament: "the book of the
generation of Jesus Christ, son of Abraham, son of
David." And it is set forth with singular beauty in
the Gospel of the Infancy. Mary's song and Zacharias'
prophecy recall the freedom and simplicity of an
inspiration long silenced, as they tell how "the Lord
hath visited and redeemed His people; He hath shown
mercy to our fathers, in remembrance of His holy
covenant, the oath which He sware unto Abraham our
father." And again, "He hath helped Israel His
servant in remembrance of His mercy, as He spake
to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed for ever."
"What then is the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise hath been made; and it was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could make alive, verily righteousness would have been of the law. Howbeit the Scripture hath shut up all things under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. But before faith came, we were kept in ward under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. So that the law hath been our tutor to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith."—Gal. iii. 19-24.
This question must indeed have early forced itself upon Paul's mind. How could the doctrine of Salvation by Faith and the supremacy of the Abrahamic Covenant be reconciled with the Divine commission of Moses? How, on the other hand, could the displacement of the Law by the Gospel be justified, if the former too was authorised and inspired by God? Can the same God have given to men these two contrasted revelations of Himself? The answer, contained in the passage before us, is that the two revelations had different ends in view. They are complementary, not competing institutes. Of the two, the Covenant of Promise has the prior right; it points immediately to Christ. The Legal economy is ancillary thereto; it never professed to accomplish the work of grace, as the Judaists would have it do. Its office was external, but nevertheless accessory to that of the Promise. It guarded and schooled the infant heirs of Abraham's Testament, until the time of its falling due, when they should be prepared in the manhood of faith to enter on their inheritance. "The law hath been our tutor for Christ, with the intent we should be justified by faith" (ver. 24).
This aspect of the Law, under which, instead of
being an obstacle to the life of faith, it is seen to
subserve it, has been suggested already. "For I," the
Apostle said, "through law died to law" (ch. ii. 19).
The Law first impelled him to Christ. It constrained
him to look beyond itself. Its discipline was a preparation
for faith. Paul reverses the relation in which
faith and Law were set by the Judaists. They brought
in the Law to perfect the unfinished work of faith
(ver. 3): he made it preliminary and propædeutic.
What they gave out for more advanced doctrine, he
treats as the "weak rudiments," belonging to the infancy
I. "For the sake of the transgressions (committed
against it) Τῶν πα�αβάσεων: the definite article can scarcely mean less than
this.
1. For the sake of transgressions. In other words,
the object of the law of Moses was to develope sin.
This is not the whole of the Apostle's answer; but
it is the key to his explanation. This design of the
Mosaic revelation determined its form and character.
Here is the standpoint from which we are to estimate
its working, and its relation to the kingdom of grace.
The saying of
This enigma, as a psychological question, is resolved
by the Apostle in
But are we compelled to put so harsh a sense on the
Apostle's words? May we not say that the Law was
imposed in order to restrain sin, to keep it within
bounds? Some excellent interpreters read the verse
in this way. It is quite true that, in respect of public
morals and the outward manifestations of evil, the
Jewish law acted beneficially, as a bridle upon the
sinful passions. But this is beside the mark. The
Apostle is thinking only of inward righteousness, that
which avails before God. The wording of the clause
altogether excludes the milder interpretation. For the
sake of (χάριν, Latin gratia) signifies promotion, not
prevention. And the word transgression, by its Pauline
and Jewish usage, compels us to this view. Comp. the reference to this word in Chapter IX., p. 143.
2. The Law of Moses was therefore a provisional
dispensation,—"added until the seed should come to
whom the promise hath been made." Its object was
to make itself superfluous. It "is not made for a
righteous man; but for the lawless and unruly" (
Nor when He came, did "the Son of man find faith
in the earth"! The people of the Law had no sooner
seen than they hated "Him to whom the law and
the prophets gave witness." Yet, strangely enough,
the very manner of their rejection showed how
complete was the preparation for His coming. Two
features, rarely united, marked the ethical condition of
the Jewish people at this time—an intense moral consciousness,
and a deep moral perversion; reverence for
the Divine law, combined with an alienation from its
spirit. The chapter of Paul's autobiography to which
we have so often referred (
3. And further, the Law of Moses revealed God's will in a veiled and accommodated fashion, while the Promise and the Gospel are its direct emanations. This is the inference which we draw from vv. 19, 20.
We are well aware of the extreme difficulty of this passage. Ver. 20 has received, it is computed, some four hundred and thirty distinct interpretations. Of all the "hard things our beloved brother Paul" has written, this is the very hardest. The words which make up the sentence are simple and familiar; and yet in their combination most enigmatic. And it stands in the midst of a paragraph among the most interesting and important that the Apostle ever wrote.
Let us look first at the latter clause of ver. 19:
"ordained through angels, in the hand (i.e. by means)
of a mediator." These circumstances, as the orthodox
More is hinted than is expressly said in Scripture
of the part taken by the angels in the Law-giving.
A doubtful citation at the best: the reading of the LXX is more to
the point than the Hebrew text. See the quotations from Jewish writers to this effect given by
Meyer or Lightfoot.
But while such intermediacy, from the Jewish standpoint,
increased the splendour and authority of the
Law, believers in Christ had learned to look at the Comp.
The same thought is expressed, as Bishop Lightfoot
aptly shows, by the figure of "the veil on Moses' face,"
which Paul employs with so much felicity in But the title "mediator" belongs to Christ, given by Paul himself—the
"one mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus" (
The Law employed a mediator; the Promise did not
(ver. 19.). With this contrast in our minds we approach
ver. 20. On the other side of it (ver. 21), we find
Law and Promise again in sharp antithesis. The same
antithesis runs through the intervening sentence. The
two clauses of ver. 20 belong to the Law and Promise
respectively. "Now a mediator is not of one:" that is
an axiom which holds good of the Law. "But God is
one:" this glorious truth, the first article of Israel's
creed, applies to the Promise. Where "a mediator"
is necessary, unity is wanting,—not simply in a
numerical, but in a moral sense, as matter of feeling
and of aim. There are separate interests, discordant
views to be consulted. This was true of Mosaism.
Although in substance "holy and just and good," it
was by no means purely Divine. It was not the absolute
religion. Not only was it defective; it contained,
in the judgement of Christ, positive elements of wrong,
precepts given "for the hardness of men's hearts."
"But God is one." Here again the unity is moral
God is One: this great article of faith was the
foundation of Israel's life. It forms the first sentence
of the Shemá, the "Hear, O Israel" ( Comp.
II. So far the Apostle has pursued the contrast
between the systems of Law and Grace. When finally
he has referred the latter rather than the former to
the "one God," we naturally ask, "Is the Law then
against the promises of God?" (ver. 21). Was the
Legal dispensation a mere reaction, a retrogression from
the Promise? This would be to push Paul's argument
to an antinomian extreme. He hastens to protest.—"The
law against the promises? Away with the
thought." Not on the Apostle's premises, but on those
of his opponents, did this consequence ensue. It is
they who set the two at variance, by trying to make
law do the work of grace. "For if a law had been
given that could bring men to life, righteousness would
verily in that case have been of law" (ver. 21). That
righteousness, and therefore life, is not of law, the
Apostle has abundantly shown (ch. ii. 16; iii. 10-13).
Had the Law provided some efficient means of
its own for winning righteousness, there would then
indeed have been a conflict between the two principles.
As matters stand, there is none. Law and Promise
move on different planes. Their functions are distinct.
Yet there is a connection between them. The design
of the Law is to mediate between the Promise and
its fulfilment. "The trespass" must be "multiplied,"
the knowledge of sin deepened, before Grace can do
its office. The fever of sin has to come to its crisis,
before the remedy can take effect. Law is therefore
not the enemy, but the minister of Grace. It was
1. For, in the first place, the law cuts men off from all other hope of salvation.
On the Judaistic hypothesis, "righteousness would have been of law." But quite on the contrary, "the Scripture shuts up everything under sin, that the promise might be given in the way of faith in Jesus Christ, to them that believe" (ver. 22). Condemnation inevitable, universal, was pronounced by the Divine word under the Law, not in order that men might remain crushed beneath its weight, but that, abandoning vain hopes of self-justification, they might find in Christ their true deliverer.
The Apostle is referring here to the general purport
of "the Scripture." His assertion embraces the whole
teaching of the Old Testament concerning human
sinfulness, embodied, for example, in the chain of
citations drawn out in
Now the judgement of Scripture is not uttered
against this class of men or that, against this type of
sin or that. Its impeachment sweeps the entire area of
human life, sounding the depths of the heart, searching
every avenue of thought and desire. It makes of the
world one vast prison-house, with the Law for gaoler,
and mankind held fast in chains of sin, waiting for Hence the present participle, συγκλειόμενοι (Revised reading
of ver. 23), in combination with the imperfect of the foregoing verb,
�φ�ον�ουμεθα.
In this dramatic fashion Paul shows how the Mosaic
law by its ethical discipline prepared men for a life
which by itself it was incapable of giving. Where
Law has done its work well, it produces, as in the
Apostle's earlier experience, a profound sense of personal
demerit, a tenderness of conscience, a contrition of heart
which makes one ready thankfully to receive "the
righteousness which is of God by faith." In every
age and condition of life a like effect is wrought
Faith is trebly honoured here. It is the condition of
the gift, the characteristic of its recipient (vv. 22, 24),
and the end for which he was put under the charge of
Law (ver. 23). "To them that believe" is "given," as
it was in foretaste to Abraham (ver. 6), a righteousness
unearned, and bestowed on Christ's account (ch. iii.
13;
2. Paul makes use of a second figure to describe
the office of the Law; under which he gives his final
answer to the question of ver. 19. The metaphor of the
gaoler is exchanged for that of the tutor. "The law
hath been our παιδαγωγὸς for Christ." This Greek
word (boy-leader) has no English equivalent; we have
not the thing it represents. The "pedagogue" was a
sort of nursery governor,—a confidential servant in the
Greek household, commonly a slave, who had charge of
the boy from his infancy, and was responsible for his
oversight. In his food, his clothes, his home-lessons,
his play, his walks—at every point the pedagogue was
This figure implies not like the last the imprisoned condition of the subject—but his childish, undeveloped state. This is an advance of thought. The Law was something more than a system of restraint and condemnation. It contained an element of progress. Under the tutelage of his pedagogue the boy is growing up to manhood. At the end of its term the Law will hand over its charge mature in capacity and equal to the responsibilities of faith. "If then the Law is a παιδαγωγός, it is not hostile to Grace, but its fellow-worker; but should it continue to hold us fast when Grace has come, then it would be hostile" (Chrysostom).
Although the highest function, that of "giving life,"
is denied to the Law, a worthy part is still assigned
to it by the Apostle. It was "a tutor to lead men to
Christ." Judaism was an education for Christianity.
It prepared the world for the Redeemer's coming. It
drilled and moralised the religious youth of the human
race. It broke up the fallow-ground of nature, and
cleared a space in the weed-covered soil to receive
the seed of the kingdom. Its moral regimen
deepened the conviction of sin, while it multiplied its
overt acts. Its ceremonial impressed on sensuous
natures the idea of the Divine holiness; and its sacrificial
rites gave definiteness and vividness to men's
The Law of Moses has formed in the Jewish nation a type of humanity like no other in the world. "They dwell alone," said Balaam, "and shall not be reckoned amongst the nations." Disciplined for ages under their harsh "pedagogue," this wonderful people acquired a strength of moral fibre and a spiritual sensibility that prepared them to be the religious leaders of mankind. Israel has given us David and Isaiah, Paul and John. Christ above all was "born under law—of David's seed according to flesh." The influence of Jewish minds at this present time on the world's higher thought, whether for good or evil, is incalculable; and it penetrates everywhere. The Christian Church may with increased emphasis repeat Paul's anticipation, "What will the receiving of them be, but life from the dead!" They have a great service still to do for the Lord and for His Christ. It was well for them and for us that they have "borne the yoke in their youth."
"But now that faith is come, we are no longer under a tutor. For ye are all sons of God, through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female: for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus. And if ye are Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, heirs according to promise."—Gal. iii. 25-29.
Faith is the true emancipator of the human mind. It
comes to take its place as mistress of the soul, queen
in the realm of the heart; to be henceforth its spring
of life, the norm and guiding principle of its activity.
"The life that I live in the flesh," Paul testifies, "I
live in faith." The Mosaic law—a system of external,
repressive ordinances—is no longer to be the
basis of religion. Law itself, and for its proper purposes,
Faith honours and magnifies (
The efficacy of faith lies in its object. "Works"
assume an intrinsic merit in the doer; faith has its
virtue in Him it trusts. It is the soul's recumbency
on Christ. "Through faith in Christ Jesus," Paul
goes on to say, "ye are all sons of God." Christ
evokes the faith which shakes off legal bondage, leaving
the age of formalism and ritual behind, and beginning
for the world an era of spiritual freedom. "In Christ
Jesus" faith has its being; He constitutes for the soul
a new atmosphere and habitat, in which faith awakens
to full existence, bursts the confining shell of legalism,
We prefer, with Ellicott and Meyer, to attach the
complement "in Christ Jesus" The phrase faith in Christ Jesus is a link between this Epistle and
those of the third and fourth groups. Comp.
I. It is faith in Christ then which constitutes us sons of God. This principle is the foundation-stone of the Christian life.
In the Old Testament the sonship of believers lay in
shadow. Jehovah was "the King, the Lord of Hosts,"
the "Shepherd of Israel." They are "His people, the
sheep of His pasture"—"My servant Jacob," He says,
"Israel whom I have chosen." If He is named Father,
it is of the collective Israel, not the individual; otherwise
the title occurs only in figure and apostrophe.
The promise of this blessedness had never been explicitly
given under the Covenant of Moses. The assurance
quoted in
But "beloved, now are we children of God" (
The Apostle is virtually repeating here what he said
in vv. 2-5 touching the "receiving of the Spirit,"
which is, he declared, the distinctive mark of the
Christian state, and raises its possessor ipso facto above
the religion of externalism. The antithesis of flesh
and spirit now becomes that of sonship and pupilage.
Christ Himself, in the words of
This was true of "so many as were baptized into Christ"—an expression employed not in order to limit the assertion, but to extend it coincidently with the "all" of ver. 26. There was no difference in this respect between the circumcised and uncircumcised. Every baptized Galatian was a son of God. Baptism manifestly presupposes faith. To imagine that the opus operatum, the mechanical performance of the rite apart from faith present or anticipated in the subject, "clothes us with Christ," is to hark back to Judaism. It is to substitute baptism for circumcision—a difference merely of form, so long as the doctrine of ritual regeneration remains the same. This passage is as clear a proof as could well be desired, that in the Pauline vocabulary "baptized" is synonymous with "believing." The baptism of these Galatians solemnised their spiritual union with Christ. It was the public acceptance, in trust and submission, of God's covenant of grace—for their children haply, as well as for themselves.
In the case of the infant, the household to which it
belongs, the religious community which receives it to be
nursed in its bosom, stand sponsors for its faith. On
them will rest the blame of broken vows and responsibility
disowned, if their baptized children are left to
lapse into ignorance of Christ's claims upon them. The
Church which practises infant baptism assumes a very
serious obligation. If it takes no sufficient care to
The baptism of the Galatians signalised their entrance
"into Christ," the union of their souls with the
dying, risen Lord. They were "baptized," as Paul
phrases it elsewhere, "into His death," to "walk"
henceforth with Him "in newness of life." By its very
form—the normal and most expressive form of primitive
baptism, the descent into and rising from the
symbolic waters—it pictured the soul's death with
Christ, its burial and its resurrection in Him, its
separation from the life of sin and entrance upon the
new career of a regenerated child of God (
By receiving Christ, inwardly accepted in faith, visibly
assumed in baptism, we are made sons of God. He
makes us free of the house of God, where He rules as
Son, and where no slave may longer stay. Those
who called themselves "Abraham's seed" and yet were
"slaves of sin," must be driven from the place in God's
household which they dishonoured, and must forfeit
their abused prerogatives. They were not Abraham's
children, for they were utterly unlike him; the Devil
surely was their father, whom by their lusts they
featured. So Christ declared to the unbelieving Jews
(
Now this dignity belongs universally to Christian faith. "Ye are all," the Apostle says, "sons of God through faith in Him." Sonship is a human, not a Jewish distinction. The discipline Israel had endured, it endured for the world. The Gentiles have no need to pass through it again. Abraham's blessing, when it came, was to embrace "all the families of the earth." The new life in Christ in which it is realised, is as large in scope as it is complete in nature. "Faith in Christ Jesus" is a condition that opens the door to every human being,—"Jew or Greek, bond or free, male or female." If then baptized, believing Gentiles are sons of God, they stand already on a level higher than any to which Mosaism raised its professors. "Putting on Christ," they are robed in a righteousness brighter and purer than that of the most blameless legalist. What can Judaism do for them more? How could they wish to cover their glorious dress with its faded, worn-out garments? To add circumcision to their faith would be not to rise, but to sink from the state of sons to that of serfs.
II. On this first principle of the new life there rests a second. The sons of God are brethren to each other. Christianity is the perfection of society, as well as of the individual. The faith of Christ restores the broken unity of mankind. "In Christ Jesus there is no Jew or Greek; there is no bondman or freeman; there is no male and female. You are all one in Him."
The Galatian believer at his baptism had entered a
communion which gave him for the first time the sense
of a common humanity. In Jesus Christ he found a
bond of union with his fellows, an identity of interest
Paul, to be sure, does not mean that these differences
have ceased to exist. He fully recognises them; and
indeed insists strongly on the proprieties of sex, and on
the duties of civil station. He values his own Jewish
birth and Roman citizenship. But "in Christ Jesus"
he "counts them refuse" (
This rule of the Apostle's was a new principle in
religion, pregnant with immense consequences. The
Stoic cosmopolitan philosophy made a considerable
Greek culture, moreover, and Roman government, as it has often been observed, had greatly tended to unify mankind. They diffused a common atmosphere of thought and established one imperial law round the circuit of the Mediterranean shores. But these conquests of secular civilization, the victories of arms and arts, were achieved at the expense of religion. Polytheism is essentially barbarian. It flourishes in division and in ignorance. To bring together its innumerable gods and creeds was to bring them all into contempt. The one law, the one learning now prevailing in the world, created a void in the conscience of mankind, only to be filled by the one faith. Without a centre of spiritual unity, history shows that no other union will endure. But for Christianity, the Græco-Roman civilization would have perished, trampled out by the feet of Goths and Huns.
The Jewish faith failed to meet the world's demand
for a universal religion. It could never have saved
European society. Nor was it designed for such a
This particularism of the Mosaic system was, to
Paul's mind, a proof of its temporary character. The
abiding faith, the faith of "Abraham and his seed,"
must be broad as humanity. It could know nothing
of Jew and Gentile, of master and slave, nor even of
man and woman; it knows only the soul and God. The
gospel of Christ allied itself thus with the nascent instinct
of humanity, the fellow-feeling of the race. It
adopted the sentiment of the Roman poet, himself an enfranchised
slave, who wrote: Homo sum, et humani
a me nil alienum puto. In our religion human kinship
at last receives adequate expression. The Son of man
lays the foundation of a world-wide fraternity. The
The practice of the Church has fallen far below the doctrine of Christ and His Apostles. In this respect Mohammedans and Buddhists might teach Christian congregations a lesson of fraternity. The arrangements of our public worship seem often designed expressly to emphasize social distinctions, and to remind the poor man of his inequality. Our native hauteur and conventionality are nowhere more painfully conspicuous than in the house of God. English Christianity is seamed through and through with caste-feeling. This lies at the root of our sectarian jealousies. It is largely due to this cause that the social ideal of Jesus Christ has been so deplorably ignored, and that a frank brotherly fellowship amongst the Churches is at present impossible. Sacerdotalism first destroyed the Christian brotherhood by absorbing in the official ministry the functions of the individual believer. And the Protestant Reformation has but partially re-established these prerogatives. Its action has been so far too exclusively negative and protéstant, too little constructive and creative. It has allowed itself to be secularised and identified with existing national limitations and social distinctions. How greatly has the authority of our faith and the influence of the Church suffered from this error. The filial consciousness should produce the fraternal consciousness. With the former we may have a number of private Christians; with the latter only can we have a Church.
"Ye are all," says the Apostle, "one (man) in Christ
Jesus." The numeral is masculine, not neuter—one
person (no abstract unity), Comp.
The unity Paul desiderates would effectually counteract
the Judaistic agitation. The force of the latter lay
in antipathy. Paul's opponents contended that there
And "if you—whether Jews or Greeks—are Christ's,
then are you Abraham's seed, heirs in terms of the
Promise." So the Apostle brings to a close this part
of his argument, and links it to what he has said before
touching the fatherhood of Abraham. Since ver. 18 we
have lost sight of the patriarch; but he has not been
forgotten. From that verse Paul has been conducting
us onward through the legal centuries which parted
Abraham from Christ. He has shown how the law of
Moses interposed between promise and fulfilment,
schooling the Jewish race and mankind in them for its
accomplishment. Now the long discipline is over.
The hour of release has struck. Faith resumes her
ancient sway, in a larger realm. In Christ a new,
universal humanity comes into existence, formed of
men who by faith are grafted into Him. Partakers of
Christ never stands alone. "In the midst of the Church—firstborn of many brethren" He presents Himself, standing "in the presence of God for us." He has secured for mankind and keeps in trust its glorious heritage. In Him we hold in fee the ages past and to come. The sons of God are heirs of the universe.
"But I say that so long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing from a bondservant, though he is lord of all; but is under guardians and stewards until the term appointed of the father. So we also, when we were children, were held in bondage under the rudiments of the world: but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that He might redeem them which were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba Father. So that thou art no longer a bondservant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God."—Gal. iv. 1-7.
In this, as in the previous chapter, the pre-Christian
state is assigned to the Jew, who was the chief subject
of Divine teaching in the former dispensation; it is set
forth under the first person (ver. 3), in the language of
The difference between Judaism and Christianity, historically unfolded in ch. iii., is here restated in graphic summary. We see, first, the heir of God in his minority; and again, the same heir in possession of his estate.
I. One can fancy the Jew replying to Paul's previous
argument in some such style as this. "You pour
contempt," he would say, "on the religion of your
fathers. You make them out to have been no better
The man of the Old Covenant was a child of God in posse, not in esse, in right but not in fact. The "infant" is his father's trueborn son. In time he will be full owner. Meanwhile he is as subject as any slave on the estate. There is nothing he can command for his own. He is treated and provided for as a bondman might be; put "under stewards" who manage his property, "and guardians" in charge of his person, "until the day fore-appointed of the father." This situation does not exclude, it implies fatherly affection and care on the one side, and heirship on the other. But it forbids the recognition of the heir, his investment with filial rights. It precludes the access to the father and acquaintance with him, which the boy will gain in after years. He sees him at a distance and through others, under the aspect of authority rather than of love. In this position he does not yet possess the spirit of a son. Such was in truth the condition of Hebrew saints—heirs of God, but knowing it not.
This illustration raises in ver. 2 an interesting legal
question, touching the latitude given by Roman or
other current law to the father in dealing with his
This analogy, like that of the "testament" in ch. iii., is not complete at all points; nor could any human figure of these Divine things be made so. The essential particulars involved in it are first, the childishness of the infant heir; secondly, the subordinate position in which he is placed for the time; and thirdly, the right of the father to determine the expiry of his infancy.
1. "When we were children," says the Apostle.
This implies, not a merely formal and legal bar, but an
intrinsic disqualification. To treat the child as a man
is preposterous. The responsibilities of property are
beyond his strength and his understanding. Such
powers in his hands could only be instruments of
mischief, to himself most of all. In the Divine order,
calling is suited to capacity, privilege to age. The
coming of Christ was timed to the hour. The world
of the Old Testament, at its wisest and highest, was
unripe for His gospel. The revelation made to Paul
could not have been received by Moses, or David, or
Isaiah. His doctrine was only possible after and in
2. But what is meant by the "stewards and guardians"
of this Jewish period of infancy? Ver. 3 tells us this,
in language, however, somewhat obscure: "We were
held in bondage under the rudiments (or elements) of
the world"—a phrase synonymous with the foregoing
"under law" (ch. iii. 23). The "guard" and "tutor"
of the previous section re-appears, with these "rudiments
of the world" in his hand. They form the
system under which the young heir was schooled, up
to the time of his majority. They belonged to "the
world" Surely the world of men, not the cosmical elements; comp.
3. The will of the Father determined the period of
this guardianship. However it may be in human law,
this right of fore-ordination resides in the Divine
Fatherhood. In His unerring foresight He fixed the
hour when His sons should step into their filial place.
All such "times and seasons," Christ declared, "the
Father hath appointed on His own authority" (
II. However, the nonage of the Church has passed. God's sons are now to be owned for such. It is Christ's mission to constitute men sons of God (vv. 4, 5).
His advent was the turning-point of human affairs,
"the fulness of time." Paul's glance in these verses
takes in a vast horizon. He views Christ in His
relation both to God and to humanity, both to law and
redemption. The appearance of "the Son of God,
woman-born," completes the previous course of time;
it is the goal of antecedent revelation, unfolding "the
mystery kept secret through times eternal," but now
"made known to all the nations" (
1. The sending of the Son brought the world's servitude
to an end. "Henceforth," said Jesus, "I call you not
servants" (
He sent Him as "His Son." To speak of Christ,
with the mystical Germans, as the ideal Urmensch—the
ideal Son of man, the foretype of humanity—is to
express a great truth. Mankind was created in Christ,
who is "the image of God, firstborn of all creation."
But this is not what Paul is saying here. The doubly
compounded Greek verb at the head of this sentence
(repeated with like emphasis in ver. 6) signifies "sent
forth from" Himself: He came in the character of
God's Son, bringing His sonship with Him. He was
the Son of God before He was sent out. He did not
become so in virtue of His mission to mankind. His
relations with men, in Paul's conception, rested upon
"The Son of God," arriving "in the fulness of time,"
enters human life. Like any other son of man, He is
born of a woman, born under law. Here is the kenosis,
the emptying of Divinity, of which the Apostle speaks
in Comp.
Nor is "born under law" a distinction intended to
limit the previous term, as though it meant a born Jew,
and not a mere woman's son. This expression, to the
mind of the reader of ch. iii., conveys the idea of subjection,
of humiliation rather than eminence. "Though
He was (God's) Son," Christ must needs "learn His
obedience" (
The Son of God who was to end the legal bondage, was sent into it Himself. He wore the legal yoke that He might break it. He took "the form of a servant," to win our enfranchisement. "God sent forth His Son, human, law-bound—that He might redeem those under law."
Redemption was Christ's errand. We have learned
already how "He redeemed us from the curse of the
law," by the sacrifice of the cross (ch. iii. 13). This
was the primary object of His mission: to ransom men
from the guilt of past sin. Now we discern its further
purpose—the positive and constructive side of the
Divine counsel. Justification is the preface to adoption.
The man "under law" is not only cursed by his
failure to keep it; he lives in a servile state, debarred
from filial rights. Christ "bought us out" of this
condition. While the expiation rendered in His death
clears off the entail of human guilt, His incarnate life
and spiritual union with believing men sustain that
action, making the redemption complete and permanent.
As enemies, "we were reconciled to God by the death
of His Son;" now "reconciled, we shall be saved by
His life" (
2. So much for the ground of sonship. Its proof lay in the sending forth of the Spirit of the Son.
The mission of the Son and that of the Spirit are
spoken of in vv. 3-6 in parallel terms: "God sent
forth His Son—sent forth the Spirit of His Son," the
former into the world of men, the latter "into" their
individual "hearts." The second act matches the first,
and crowns it. Pentecost is the sequel of the Incarnation
(
This sentiment was not due to their own reflection,
not the mere opening of a buried spring of feeling in
their nature. God sent it into their hearts. The outward
miracles which attended the first bestowment of
this gift, showed from what source it came (ch. iii. 5).
Nor did Christ personally impart the assurance. He
had gone, that the Paraclete might come. Here was
another Witness, sent by a second mission from the
Father (
To us He is "the Spirit of adoption," replacing the former "spirit of bondage unto fear." For by His indwelling we are "joined to the Lord" and made "one spirit" with Him, so that Christ lives in us (ch. ii. 20). And since Christ is above all things the Son, His Spirit is a spirit of sonship; those who receive Him are sons of God. Our sonship is through the Holy Spirit derived from His. Till Christ's redemption was effected, such adoption was in the nature of things impossible. This filial cry of Gentile hearts attested the entrance of a Divine life into the world. The Spirit of God's Son had become the new spirit of mankind.
Abba, the Syrian vocative for father, was a word
familiar to the lips of Jesus. The instance of its use
recorded in
"Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit,"
with this cry. The witness of sonship follows on the
adoption, and seals it. The child is born, then cries;
the cry is the evidence of life. But this is not the first
office of the Holy Spirit to the regenerate soul. Many
a silent impulse has He given, frequent and long continued
may have been His visitations, before His
presence reveals itself audibly. From the first the new
life of grace is implanted by His influence. "That which
is born of the Spirit, is spirit." "He dwelleth with you,
and is in you,"
The interchange of person in the subject of vv. 5-8 is very noticeable. This agitated style betrays high-strung emotion. Writing first, in ver. 3, in the language of Jewish experience, in ver. 6 Paul turns upon his readers and claims them for witnesses to the same adoption which Jewish believers in Christ (ver. 5) had received. Instantly he falls back into the first person; it is his own joyous consciousness that breaks forth in the filial cry of ver. 6b. In the more calm concluding sentence the second person is resumed; and now in the individualising singular, as though he would lay hold of his readers one by one, and bid them look each into his own heart to find the proof of sonship, as he writes: "So that thou art no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, also an heir through God."
An heir through God—this is the true reading, and is
greatly to the point. It carries to a climax the emphatic
repetition of "God" observed in vv. 4 and 6. "God
sent His Son" into the world; "God sent" in turn
"His Son's Spirit into your hearts." God then, and
no other, has bestowed your inheritance. It is yours
by His fiat. Who dares challenge it? Comp.
What this inheritance includes in its final attainment,
"doth not yet appear." Enough to know that "now
are we children of God." The redemption of the body,
the deliverance of nature from its sentence of dissolution,
"Howbeit at that time, not knowing God, ye were in bondage to them which by nature are no gods: but now that ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God, how turn ye back again to the weak and beggarly rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage over again? Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, lest by any means I have bestowed labour upon you in vain"—Gal. iv. 8-11.
In this expostulation two principles emerge with especial prominence.
I. First, that knowledge of God, bringing spiritual freedom, lays upon us higher responsibilities. "Then indeed," he says, "not knowing God, you were in bondage to false gods. Your heathen life was in a sense excusable. But now something very different is expected from you, since you have come to know God."
We are reminded of the Apostle's memorable words
spoken at Athens: "The times of ignorance God overlooked"
(
The Apostle again recalls them, as he does so often
his children in Christ, to the time of their conversion.
They had been, he reminds them, idolaters; ignorant
of the true God, they were "enslaved to things that
by nature are no gods." Two definitions Paul has
given of idolatry: "There is no idol in the world;"
and again, "The things which the Gentiles sacrifice,
The old heathen life was indeed a slavery, full of fear
But Paul's readers had "come to know God." They had touched the great Reality. The phantoms had vanished; the Living One stood before them. His glory shone into their hearts "in the face of Jesus Christ." This, whenever it takes place, is for any man the crisis of his life—when he comes to know God, when the God-consciousness is born in him. Like the dawn of self-consciousness, it may be gradual. There are those, the happy few, who were "born again" so soon as they were born to thought and choice; they cannot remember a time when they did not love God, when they were not sensible of being "known of Him." But with others, as with Paul, the revelation is made at an instant, coming like a lightning-flash at midnight. But unlike the lightning it remained. Let the manifestation of God come how or when it may, it is decisive. The man into whose soul the Almighty has spoken His I AM, can never be the same afterwards. He may forget; he may deny it: but he has known God; he has seen the light of life. If he returns to darkness, his darkness is blacker and guiltier than before. On his brow there rests in all its sadness "Sorrow's crown of sorrow, remembering happier things."
Offences venial, excusable hitherto, from this time
assume a graver hue. Things that in a lower stage of
life were innocent, and even possessed religious value,
The Jewish "rudiments" were designed for men
who had not known God as Christ declares Him, who
had never seen the Saviour's cross. Jewish saints
could not worship God in the Spirit of adoption. They
remained under the spirit of servitude and fear. Their
conceptions were so far "weak and poor" that they
supposed the Divine favour to depend on such matters
as the "washing of cups and pots," and the precise
number of feet that one walked on the Sabbath. These
ideas belonged to a childish stage of the religious
life. Pharisaism had developed to the utmost this
lower element of the Mosaic system, at the expense of
everything that was spiritual in it. Men who had been
brought up in Judaism might indeed, after conversion
to Christ, retain their old customs as matters of social
usage or pious habit, without regarding them as vital
to religion. With Gentiles it was otherwise. Adopting
Jewish rites de novo, they must do so on grounds
of distinct religious necessity. For this very reason the
duty of circumcision was pressed upon them. It was a
means, they were told, essential to their spiritual perfection,
to the attainment of full Christian privileges.
But to know God by the witness of the Holy Spirit of
Christ, as the Galatians had done, was an experience
sufficient to show that this "persuasion" was false.
"Known God," Paul says,—"or rather were known of God." He hastens to correct himself. He will not let an expression pass that seems to ascribe anything simply to human acquisition. "Ye have not chosen Me," said Jesus; "I have chosen you." So the Apostle John: "Not that we loved God, but that He loved us." This is true through the entire range of the Christian life. "We apprehend that for which we were apprehended by Christ Jesus." Our love, our knowledge—what are they but the sense of the Divine love and knowledge in us? Religion is a bestowment, not an achievement. It is "God working in us to will and work for the sake of His good pleasure." In this light the gospel presented itself at first to the Galatians. The preaching of the Apostle, the vision of the cross of Christ, made them sensible of God's living presence. They felt the gaze of an Infinite purity and compassion, of an All-wise, All-pitiful Father, fixed upon them. He was calling them, slaves of idolatry and sin, "into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ." The illuminating glance of God pierced to their inmost being. In that light God and the soul met, and knew each other.
And now, after this profound, transforming revelation,
this sublime communion with God, will they turn back
to a life of puerile formalities, of slavish dependence
and fear? Is the strength of their devotion to be
spent, its fragrance exhaled in the drudgery of legal
service? Surely they know God better than to think
So knowing, and so known, let them be content. Let them seek only to keep themselves in the love of God, and in the comfort of His Spirit. Raised to this high level, they must not decline to a lower. Their heathen "rudiments" were excusable before; but now even Jewish "rudiments" are things to be left behind.
II. It further appears that the Apostle saw an element existing in Judaism common to it with the ethnic religions. For he says that his readers, formerly "enslaved to idols," are "now turning back to the weak and beggarly rudiments, to which they would fain be in bondage over again."
"The rudiments" of ver. 9 cannot, without exegetical
violence, be detached from "the rudiments of the
world" of ver. 3. And these latter plainly signify the
Judaic rites (see Chapter XVI.). The Judaistic practices
of the Galatians were, Paul declares, a backsliding toward
their old idolatries. We can only escape this construction
of the passage at the cost of making the Apostle's
remonstrance inconsequent and pointless. The argument
of the letter hitherto has been directed with
concentrated purpose against Judaic conformity. To
suppose that just at this point, in making its application,
he turns aside without notice or explanation to an
entirely different matter, is to stultify his reasoning.
The only ground for referring the "days and seasons"
But how, we ask, was it possible for Paul to use language which identifies the revered law of God with rites of heathenism, which he accounted a "fellowship with demons"? Bishop Lightfoot has answered this question in words we cannot do better than quote: "The Apostle regards the higher element in heathen religion as corresponding, however imperfectly, to the lower in the Mosaic law. For we may consider both the one and the other as made up of two component parts, the spiritual and the ritualistic. Now viewed in their spiritual aspect, there is no comparison between the one and the other. In this respect the heathen religions, so far as they added anything of their own to that sense of dependence on God which is innate in man and which they could not entirely crush, were wholly bad. On the contrary, in the Mosaic law the spiritual element was most truly divine. But this does not enter into our reckoning here. For Christianity has appropriated all that was spiritual in its predecessor.... The ritualistic element alone remains to be considered, and here is the meeting-point of Judaism and Heathenism. In Judaism this was as much lower than its spiritual element, as in Heathenism it was higher. Hence the two systems approach within such a distance that they can, under certain limitations, be classed together. They have at least so much in common that a lapse into Judaism can be regarded as a relapse into the position of unconverted Heathenism. Judaism was a system of bondage like Heathenism. Heathenism had been a disciplinary training like Judaism" (Commentary in loc.).
This line of explanation may perhaps be carried a step further. Judaism was rudimentary throughout. A religion so largely ritualistic could not but be spiritually and morally defective. In its partial apprehension of the Divine attributes, its limitation of God's grace to a single people, its dim perception of immortality, there were great deficiencies in the Jewish creed. Its ethical code, moreover, was faulty; it contained "precepts given for the hardness of men's hearts"—touching, for example, the laws of marriage, and the right of revenge. There was not a little in Judaism, especially in its Pharisaic form, that belonged to a half-awakened conscience, to a rude and sensuous religious faculty. Christ came to "fulfil the law;" but in that fulfilment He did not shrink from correcting it. He emended the letter of its teaching, that its true spirit might be elicited. For an enlightened Christian who had learned of Jesus the "royal law, the law of liberty," to conform to Judaism was unmistakably to "turn back." Moreover, it was just the weakest and least spiritual part of the system of Moses that the legalist teachers inculcated on Gentile Christians; while their own lives fell short of its moral requirements (ch. vi. 12).
Mosaism had been in the days of its inspiration and
creative vigour the great opponent of idolatry. It was
the Lord's witness throughout long centuries of heathen
darkness and oppression, and by its testimony has rendered
splendid service to God and man. But from the
standpoint of Christianity a certain degree of resemblance
begins to be seen underlying this antagonism. The
faith of the Israelitish people combatted idolatry with
weapons too much like its own. A worldly and servile
element remained in it. To one who has advanced in
front, positions at an earlier stage of his progress lying
"Weak and beggarly rudiments"—it is a hard sentence;
and yet what else were Jewish ceremonies and
rules of diet, in comparison with "righteousness and
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost"? What was circumcision,
now that there was no longer "Jew and
Greek?" What was there in Saturday more than in
any other day of the week, if it ceased to be a sign
between the Lord of the Sabbath and His people?
These things were, as Paul saw them, the cast-clothes
of religion. For Gentile Christians the history of the
Jewish ordinances had much instruction; but their
observance was no whit more binding than that of
heathen ceremonies. Even in the ancient times God
valued them only as they were the expression of a
devout, believing spirit. "Your new moons and your
appointed feasts," He had said to an ungodly generation,
"My soul hateth" (
In thus decrying Jewish ordinances, the Apostle by
implication allows a certain value to the rites of Paganism.
The Galatians were formerly in bondage to
"them that are no gods." Now, he says, they are
turning again to the like servitude by conforming to
Mosaic legalism. They wish to come again under
subjection to "the weak and poor rudiments." In
Galatian heathenism Paul appears to recognise "rudiments"
of truth and a certain preparation for Christianity.
While Judaic rites amounted to no more than
rudiments of a spiritual faith, there were influences
at work in Paganism that come under the same
category. Paul believed that "God had not left Himself
without witness to any." He never treated heathen
creeds with indiscriminate contempt, as though they
were utterly corrupt and worthless. Witness his
address to the "religious" Athenians, and to the wild
people of Lycaonia (
"Days you are scrupulously keeping, and months,
and seasons, and years,"—the weekly sabbath, the
new moon, the annual festivals, the sacred seventh
year, the round of the Jewish Kalendar. On these
matters the Galatians had, as it seems, already fallen
in with the directions of the Jewish teachers. The
word by which the Apostle describes their practice,
παρατηρεῖσθε, denotes, besides the fact, the manner
and spirit of the observance—an assiduous, anxious
attention, such as the spirit of legal exaction dictated.
These prescriptions the Galatians would the more
readily adopt, because in their heathen life they were
accustomed to stated celebrations. The Pagan Kalendar
The Church of later centuries, both in its Eastern and Western branch, went far in the same direction. It made the keeping of holy days a prominent and obligatory part of Christianity; it has multiplied them superstitiously and beyond all reason. Amongst the rest it incorporated heathen festivals, too little changed by their consecration.
Paul's remonstrance condemns in principle the
enforcement of sacred seasons as things essential to
salvation, in the sense in which the Jewish Sabbath
was the bond of the ancient Covenant. We may not
place even the Lord's Day upon this footing. Far
different from this is the unforced and grateful celebration
of the First Day of the week, which sprang up in the
Apostolic Church, and is assumed by the Apostles Paul
and John (
The Apostle in protecting Gentile liberties is no
enemy to order in worship and outward life. No one
can justly quote his authority in opposition to such
appointments as a Christian community may make, for
"Weak and poor" the best forms of piety become, without inward knowledge of God. Liturgies, creeds and confessions, church music and architecture, Sundays, fasts, festivals, are beautiful things when they are the transcript of a living faith. When that is gone, their charm, their spiritual worth is gone. They no longer belong to religion; they have ceased to be a bond between the souls of men and God. "According to our faith"—our actual, not professional or "confessional" faith—"it shall be done unto us": such is the rule of Christ. To cling to formularies which have lost their meaning and to which the Spirit of truth gives no present witness, is a demoralising bondage.
But this is not the only, nor the commonest way
in which the sons of God are tempted to return to
bondage. "Whosoever committeth sin," Christ said,
"is the servant of sin." And the Apostle will have to
warn his readers that by their abuse of liberty, by their
readiness to make it "an occasion to the flesh," they
were likely to forfeit it. "They that are Christ's have
crucified the flesh" (ch. v. 24). This warning must be
balanced against the other. Our liberty from outward
constraint should be still more a liberty from the
dominion of self, from pride and desire and anger; or
"You make me afraid," at last the Apostle is compelled to say, "that I have laboured in vain." His enemies had caused him no such fear. While his children in the faith were true to him, he was afraid of nothing. "Now we live," he says in one of his Epistles, "if ye stand fast in the Lord!" But if they should fall away? He trembles for his own work, for these wayward children who had already caused him so many pangs. It is in a tone of the deepest solicitude that he continues his expostulation in the following paragraph.
"I beseech you, brethren, be as I am, for I am as ye are. Ye did me
no wrong: but ye know that because of an infirmity of the flesh I
preached the gospel unto you the first time: and that which was a
temptation to you in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but ye
received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus. Where then is
that gratulation of yourselves? for I bear you witness, that, if possible,
ye would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me. So then
am I become your enemy, because I tell you the truth? They zealously
seek you in no good way; nay, they desire to shut you out, that
ye may seek them. But it is good to be zealously sought in a good
matter at all times, and not only when I am present with you,—my
children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you. For the rendering of this clause, see the exposition which follows.
He had reminded them of their former idolatry; and this calls up to the Apostle's mind the circumstances of his first ministry in Galatia. He sees himself once more a stranger amongst this strange people, a traveller fallen sick and dependent on their hospitality, preaching a gospel with nothing to recommend it in the appearance of its advocate, and which the sickness delaying his journey had compelled him, contrary to his intention, to proclaim amongst them. Yet with what ready and generous hospitality they had received the infirm Apostle! Had he been an angel from heaven—nay, the Lord Jesus Himself, they could scarcely have shown him more attention than they did. His physical weakness, which would have moved the contempt of others, called forth their sympathies. However severely he may be compelled to censure them, however much their feelings toward him have changed, he will never forget the kindness he then received. Surely they cannot think him their enemy, or allow him to be supplanted by the unworthy rivals who are seeking their regard. So Paul pleads with his old friends, and seeks to win for his arguments a way to their hearts through the affection for himself which he fain hopes is still lingering there.
Hoc prudentis est pastoris, Calvin aptly says. But
there is more in this entreaty than a calculated prudence.
It is a cry of the heart. Paul's soul is in the
pangs of travail (ver. 19). We have seen the sternness
of his face relax while he pursues his mighty
argument. As he surveys the working of God's Comp.
There are considerable difficulties in the exegesis
of this passage. We note them in succession as they
arise:—(1) In ver. 12 we prefer, with Meyer and
Lightfoot, to read, "Be as I, for I became (rather than
am) as you—brethren, I beseech you." The verses
preceding and following both suggest the past tense
in the ellipsis. Paul's memory is busy. He appeals
to the "auld lang syne." He reminds the Galatians of
what he "had been amongst them for their sake," Comp.
(2) Suddenly Paul turns to another point, according to his wont in this emotional mood: "There is nothing in which you have wronged me." Is he contradicting some allegation which had helped to estrange the Galatians? Had some one been saying that Paul was affronted by their conduct, and was actuated by personal resentment? In that case we should have looked for a specific explanation and rebutment of the charge. Rather he is anticipating the thought that would naturally arise in the minds of his readers at this point. "Paul is asking us," they would say, "to let bygones be bygones, to give up this Judaistic attachment for his sake, and to meet him frankly on the old footing. But supposing we try to do so, he is very angry with us, as this letter shows; he thinks we have treated him badly; he will always have a grudge against us. Things can never be again as they were between ourselves and him."
Such feelings often arise upon the breach of an old
friendship, to prevent the offending party from accepting
(3) "Because of an infirmity of the flesh" (physical
weakness), is the truer rendering of ver. 13; and
"your temptation in my flesh" the genuine reading
of ver. 14, restored by the Revisers. Sickness had
arrested the Apostle's course during his second missionary
tour, and detained him in the Galatic country.
So that he had not only "been with" the Galatians
"in weakness," as afterwards when during the same
journey he preached at Corinth (
Paul had no thought of evangelizing Galatia;
another goal was in view. It was patent to them—indeed
he confessed as much at the time—that if he
had been able to proceed, he would not have lingered
in their country. This was certainly an unpromising
introduction. And the Apostle's state of health made
it at that time a trial for any one to listen to him.
There was something in the nature of his malady to
excite contempt, even loathing for his person. "That
which tried you in my flesh, ye did not despise, nor spit
out:" such is Paul's vivid phrase. How few men
would have humility enough to refer to a circumstance
of this kind; or could do so without loss of dignity.
He felt that the condition of the messenger might well
At the best Paul's appearance and address were
none of the most prepossessing. Comp.
(4) So far from taking offence at Paul's unfortunate condition, they welcomed him with enthusiasm. They "blessed themselves" that he had come (ver. 15). They said one to another, "How fortunate we are in having this good man amongst us! What a happy thing for us that Paul's sickness obliged him to stay and give us the opportunity of hearing his good news!" Such was their former "gratulation." The regard they conceived for the sick Apostle was unbounded. "For I bear you witness," he says, "that, if possible, you would have dug out your eyes and given them me!"
Is this no more than a strong hyperbole, describing
the almost extravagant devotion which the Galatians
expressed to the Apostle? Or are we to read the
terms more literally? So it has been sometimes supposed.
In this expression some critics have discovered
a clue to the nature of Paul's malady. The Galatians,
as they read the sentence, wished they could have
taken out their own eyes and given them to Paul, in
This conjecture has much to recommend it. But it
finds a very precarious support in the text. Paul
does not say, "You would have plucked out your own
(A.V.) eyes and given them me," as though he were
thinking of an exchange of eyes; but, "You would
have plucked out your eyes and given them me"—as
much as to say, "You would have done anything in
the world for me then,—even taken out your eyes and
given them to me." Comp.
(5) Suddenly the Apostle turns upon his opposers (ver. 17). The Judaizers had disturbed his happy relations with his Galatian flock; they had made them half believe that he was their enemy. The Galatians must choose between Paul and his traducers. Let them scrutinise the motives of these new teachers. Let them call to mind the claims of their father in Christ. "They are courting you," he says,—"these present suitors for your regard—dishonourably; they want to shut you out and have you to themselves, that you may pay court to them." They pretend to be zealous for your interests; but it is their own they seek (ch. vi. 12).
So far the Apostle's meaning is tolerably clear. But
ver. 18 is obscure. It may be construed in either of
two ways, as Paul or the Galatians are taken for the
subject glanced at in the verb to be courted in its first
clause: "But it is honourable to be courted always in
an honourable way, and not only when I am present
with you." Does Paul mean that he has no objection
to the Galatians making other friends in his absence?
or, that he thinks they ought not to forget him in his
absence? The latter, as we think. The Apostle complains
of their inconstancy towards himself. This is
a text for friends and lovers. Where attachment is
honourable, it should be lasting. "Set me as a seal
upon thine heart," says the Bride of the Song of Songs.
With the Galatians it seemed to be, "Out of sight,
out of mind." They allowed Paul to be pushed out by
The connection of vv. 17, 18 turns on the words
honourable and court, Ζηλόω, to have zeal towards a person or thing, to affect (A.V.: in
its older English sense of seeking, paying regard to any one).
(6) In the next verse this grief of wounded affection,
checked at first by a certain reserve, breaks out uncontrollably:
"My children, for whom again I am in travail,
till Christ be formed in you!" The full stop placed in the English Version at the end of ver. 18,
on this view, is out of place.
There is nothing gained by substituting "little children"
(John's phrase) for "children," everywhere else
used by Paul, and attested here by the best witnesses.
The sentiment is that of
Paul stands before us as an injured friend, a faithful
minister of Christ robbed of his people's love. He is
wounded in his tenderest affections. For the sake of
the Gentile Churches he had given up everything in
life that he prized (ver. 12;
But if he is grieved at this defection, he is equally perplexed. He cannot tell what to make of the Galatians, or in what tone to address them. He has warned, denounced, argued, protested, pleaded as a mother with her children; still he doubts whether he will prevail. If he could only see them and meet them as in former days, laying aside the distance, the sternness of authority which he has been forced to assume, he might yet reach their hearts. At least he would know how matters really stand, and in what language he ought to speak. So his entreaty ends: "I wish I could only be present with you now, and speak in some different voice. For I am at a loss to know how to deal with you."
This picture of estrangement and reproach tells its own tale, when its lines have once been clearly marked. We may dwell, however, a little longer on some of the lessons which it teaches:—
I. In the first place, it is evident that strong emotions and warm affections are no guarantee for the permanence of religious life.
The Galatians resembled the "stony ground" hearers of our Lord's parable,—"such as hear the word, and immediately with joy receive it; but they have no root in themselves; they believe for a time." It was not "persecution" indeed that "offended" them; but flattery proved equally effectual. They were of the same fervid temper as Peter on the night of the Passion, when he said, "Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not deny Thee in anywise,"—within a few hours thrice denying his Master, with "oaths and curses." They lacked seriousness and depth. They had fine susceptibilities and a large fund of enthusiasm; they were full of eloquent protestations; and under excitement were capable of great efforts and sacrifices. But there was a flaw in their nature. They were creatures of impulse—soon hot, soon cold. One cannot help liking such people—but as for trusting them, that is a different matter.
Nothing could be more delightful or promising than
the appearance these Churches presented in the early
days of their conversion. They heard the Apostle's
message with rapt attention; they felt its Divine
power, so strangely contrasting with his physical
feebleness. They were amazingly wrought upon. The
new life in Christ kindled all the fervour of their
passionate nature. How they triumphed in Christ!
How they blessed the day when the gospel visited their
II. Further, we observe how prone are those who have put themselves in the wrong to fix the blame on others.
The Apostle was compelled in fidelity to truth to
say hard things to his Galatian disciples. He had
previously, on his last visit, given them a solemn
warning on account of their Judaic proclivities (ch. i. 9).
In this Epistle he censures them roundly. He wonders
at them; he calls them "senseless Galatians"; he tells
them they are within a step of being cut off from
Christ (ch. v. 4). And now they cry out, "Paul is our
enemy. If he cared for us, how could he write so
cruelly! We were excessively fond of him once, we
could not do too much for him; but that is all over
now. If we had inflicted on him some great injury,
he could scarcely treat us more roughly." Thoughtless
and excitable people commonly reason in this way.
Personalities with them take the place of argument
and principle. The severity of a holy zeal for truth is
III. Men of the Galatian type are the natural prey of self-seeking agitators. However sound the principles in which they were trained, however true the friendships they have enjoyed, they must have change. The accustomed palls upon them. Giddy Athenians, they love nothing so much as "to hear and tell some new thing." They ostracize Aristides, simply because they are "tired of hearing him always called the Just." To hear "the same things," however "safe" it may be, even from an Apostle's lips is to them intolerably "grievous." They never think earnestly and patiently enough to find the deeper springs, the fresh delight and satisfaction lying hidden in the great unchanging truths. These are they who are "carried about with divers and strange doctrines," who run after the newest thing in ritualistic art, or sensational evangelism, or well-spiced heterodoxy. Truth and plain dealing, apostolic holiness and godly sincerity, are outmatched in dealing with them by the craft of worldly wisdom. A little judicious flattery, something to please the eye and catch the fancy—and they are persuaded to believe almost anything, or to deny what they have most earnestly believed.
What had the Legalists to offer compared with the
Whether the Apostle's entreaty prevailed to recall them or did not, we cannot tell. From the silence with which these Churches are passed over in the Acts of the Apostles, and the little that is heard of them afterwards, an unfavourable inference appears probable. The Judaistic leaven, it is to be feared, went far to leaven the whole lump. Paul's apprehensions were only too well-grounded. And these hopeful converts who had once "run well," were fatally "hindered" and fell far behind in the Christian race. Such, in all likelihood, was the result of the departure from the truth of the gospel into which the Galatians allowed themselves to be drawn.
Whatever was the sequel to this story, Paul's protest remains to witness to the sincerity and tenderness of the great Apostle's soul, and to the disastrous issues of the levity of character which distinguished his Galatian disciples.
"Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, one by the handmaid, and one by the freewoman. Howbeit the son by the handmaid is born after the flesh; but the son by the freewoman is born through promise. Which things contain an allegory: for these women are two covenants; one from mount Sinai, bearing children unto bondage, which is Hagar. For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia, and answereth to the Jerusalem that now is: for she is in bondage with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, which is our mother. For it is written,
Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. Howbeit what saith the scripture? Cast out the handmaid and her son; for the son of the handmaid shall not inherit with the son of the freewoman. Wherefore, brethren, we are not children of a handmaid, but of the freewoman. For freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage."—Gal. iv. 21-v. 1.
Paul cites the history of the sons of Abraham. No other example would have served his purpose. The controversy between himself and the Judaizers turned on the question, Who are the true heirs of Abraham? (ch. iii. 7, 16, 29). He made faith in Christ, they circumcision and law-keeping, the ground of sonship. So the inheritance was claimed in a double sense. But now, if it should appear that this antithesis existed in principle in the bosom of the patriarchal family, if we should find that there was an elder son of Abraham's flesh opposed to the child of promise, how powerfully will this analogy sustain the Apostle's position. Judaism will then be seen to be playing over again the part of Ishmael; and "the Jerusalem that now is" takes the place of Hagar, the slave-mother. The moral situation created by the Judaic controversy had been rehearsed in the family life of Abraham.
"Tell me," the Apostle asks, "you that would fain
be subject to the law, do you not know what it relates
concerning Abraham? He had two sons, one of free,
and the other of servile birth. Do you wish to belong
Paul's Galatian allegory has greatly exercised the minds of his critics. The word is one of ill repute in exegesis. Allegory was the instrument of Rabbinical and Alexandrine Scripturists, an infallible device for extracting the predetermined sense from the letter of the sacred text. The "spiritualising" of Christian interpreters has been carried, in many instances, to equal excess of riot. For the honest meaning of the word of God anything and everything has been substituted that lawless fancy and verbal ingenuity could read into it. The most arbitrary and grotesque distortions of the facts of Scripture have passed current under cover of the clause, "which things are an allegory." But Paul's allegory, and that of Philo and the Allegorical school, are very different things, as widely removed as the "words of truth and soberness" from the intoxications of a mystical idealism.
With Paul the spiritual sense of Scripture is based
on the historical, is in fact the moral content and import
"Which things are allegorized"—so the Apostle
literally writes in ver. 24—made matters of allegory.
The phrase intimates, as Bishop Lightfoot suggests,
that the Hagarene episode in Genesis (ch. xvi., xxi.
1-21) was commonly interpreted in a figurative way.
The Galatians had heard from their Jewish teachers
specimens of this popular mode of exposition. Paul
will employ it too; and will give his own reading of the
famous story of Ishmael and Isaac. Philo of Alexandria,
the greatest allegorist of the day, has expounded
the same history. These eminent interpreters both
make Sarah the mother of the spiritual, Hagar of the
worldly offspring; both point out how the barren is
exalted over the fruitful wife. So far, we may imagine,
Paul is moving on the accepted lines of Jewish exegesis.
Under this allegorical dress the Apostle expounds once more his doctrine, already inculcated, of the difference between the Legal and Christian state. The former constitutes, as he now puts the matter, a bastard sonship like that of Ishmael, conferring only an external and provisional tenure in the Abrahamic inheritance. It is contrasted with the spiritual sonship of the true Israel in the following respects:—It is a state of nature as opposed to grace; of bondage as opposed to freedom; and further, it is temporary and soon to be ended by the Divine decree.
I. "He who is of the maid-servant is after the flesh; but he that is of the free-woman is through promise.... Just as then he that was after the flesh persecuted him that was after the Spirit, so now" (vv. 23, 29). The Apostle sees in the different parentage of Abraham's sons the ground of a radical divergence of character. One was the child of nature, the other was the son of a spiritual faith.
Ishmael was in truth the fruit of unbelief; his birth
was due to a natural but impatient misreading of the
promise. The patriarch's union with Hagar was ill-assorted
and ill-advised. It brought its natural penalty
by introducing an alien element into his family life.
The low-bred insolence which the serving-woman, in
the prospect of becoming a mother, showed toward
In Ishmael's relation to his father there was nothing
but the ordinary play of human motives. "The son
of the handmaid was born after the flesh." He was
a natural son. But Ishmael was not on that account
cut off from the Divine mercies. Nor did his father's
prayer, "O that Ishmael might live before Thee"
(
To a similar position Judaism, in the Apostle's view,
had now reduced itself. And to this footing the Galatian
Churches would be brought if they yielded to the
Judaistic solicitations. To be circumcised would be for
The persecution of the Church by Judaism gave
proof of the Ishmaelite spirit, the carnal animus by
which it was possessed. A religion of externalism
naturally becomes repressive. It knows not "the
demonstration of the Spirit"; it has "confidence in
the flesh." It relies on outward means for the propagation
of its faith; and naturally resorts to the secular
arm. The Inquisition and the Auto-da-fé are a not
unfitting accompaniment of the gorgeous ceremonial of
the Mass. Ritualism and priestly autocracy go hand
in hand. "So now," says Paul, pointing to Ishmael's
"persecution" of the infant Isaac, hinted at in
The laughter of Hagar's boy at Sarah's weaning-feast
seems but a slight offence to be visited with the
punishment of expulsion; and the incident one beneath
the dignity of theological argument. But the principle
for which Paul contends is there; and it is the more
easily apprehended when exhibited on this homely
scale. The family is the germ and the mirror of
society. In it are first called into play the motives
which determine the course of history, the rise and fall
of empires or churches. The gravamen of the charge Kalisch, Commentary, on
The Apostle's comparison must have been mortifying
in the extreme to the Judaists. They are told in plain
terms that they are in the position of outcast Ishmael;
while uncircumcised Gentiles, without a drop of Abraham's
II. From this contrast of birth "according to flesh"
and "through promise" is deduced the opposition
between the slave-born and free-born sons. "For these
(the slave-mother and the free-woman) are two covenants,
one indeed bearing children unto bondage—which
is Hagar" (ver. 24). The other side of the
antithesis is not formally expressed; it is obvious.
Sarah the princess, Abraham's true wife, has her
counterpart in the original covenant of promise renewed
in Christ, and in "the Jerusalem above, which
is our mother" (ver. 26). Sarah is the typical mother, Comp.
The first clause of ver. 25 is best understood in the
shorter, marginal reading of the R. V., also preferred
by Bishop Lightfoot (τὸ γὰρ Σινᾶ
ὄρος ἐστίν κ.τ.λ.). It Paul writes "the Sinai mountain" (τὸ Σινᾶ ὄÏ�ος) in tacit opposition
to the other, familiar Mount Zion (Hofmann in loc.). In
Jerusalem was no longer the mother of freemen.
The boast, "we are Abraham's sons; we were never in
bondage" (
But ver. 26 sounds the note of deliverance: "The
Jerusalem above is free; and she is our mother!"
Paul has escaped from the prison of Legalism, from the
confines of Sinai; he has left behind the perishing
earthly Jerusalem, and with it the bitterness and gloom
of his Pharisaic days. He is a citizen of the heavenly
Zion, breathing the air of a Divine freedom. The
yoke is broken from the neck of the Church of God;
the desolation is gone from her heart. There come to
the Apostle's lips the words of the great prophet of the
Exile, depicting the deliverance of the spiritual Zion,
despised and counted barren, but now to be the mother
of a numberless offspring. In Isaiah's song, "Rejoice,
thou barren that bearest not" (ch. liv.), the laughter of
the childless Sarah bursts forth again, to be gloriously
renewed in the persecuted Church of Jesus. Robbed
III. "And the bondman abideth not in the house for
ever; the Son abideth for ever" (
Sooner or later the slave-boy was bound to go. He
has no proper birthright, no permanent footing in the
house. One day he exceeds his licence, he makes
himself intolerable; he must begone. "What saith the
Scripture? Cast out the maidservant and her son;
for the son of the maidservant shall not inherit with
the son of the freewoman" (ver. 30). Paul has pronounced
the doom of Judaism. His words echo those
of Christ: "Behold your house is left unto you desolate"
(
The Israelitish people showed more than Ishmael's
jealousy towards the infant Church of the Spirit. No
weapon of violence or calumny was too base to be
used against it. The cup of their iniquity was filling
fast. They were ripening for the judgement which
Christ predicted (
This passage signalises the definite breach of Christianity with Judaism. The elder Apostles lingered in the porch of the Temple; the primitive Church clung to the ancient worship. Paul does not blame them for doing so. In their case this was but the survival of a past order, in principle acknowledged to be obsolete. But the Church of the future, the spiritual seed of Abraham gathered out of all nations, had no part in Legalism. The Apostle bends all his efforts to convince his readers of this, to make them sensible of the impassable gulf lying between them and outworn Mosaism. Again he repeats, "We are not children of a maidservant, but of her that is free" (ver. 31). The Church of Christ can no more hold fellowship with Judaism than could Isaac with the spiteful, mocking Ishmael. Paul leads the Church across the Rubicon. There is no turning back.
Ver. 1 of ch. v. is the application of the allegory. It
is a triumphant assertion of liberty, a ringing summons
to its defence. Its separation from ch. iv. is ill-judged, The reading of this clause is doubtful. The ancient witnesses
disagree. Dr. Hort suggests that the Revised reading—the best attested,
but scarcely grammatical—may be due to a primitive corruption,
ΤΗ for ΕΠ(�λευθε�ίᾳ). This emendation gives an excellent and
apposite sense: for (with a view to) freedom Christ set us free. The
phrase �π' �λευθε�ίᾳ is found in ver. 13, and would gain additional
force there, if read as a repetition of what is affirmed here. The confusion
of letters involved is a natural one; and once made at an early
time in some standard copy, it would account for the extraordinary
confusion of reading into which the verse has fallen. If conjectural
emendation may be admitted anywhere in the N. T., it is legitimate in
this instance.
How the Galatians responded to the Apostle's
"Behold, I Paul say unto you, that, if ye receive circumcision, Christ will profit you nothing. Yea, I testify again to every man that receiveth circumcision, that he is a debtor to do the whole law. Ye are severed from Christ, ye who would be justified by the law; ye are fallen away from grace. For we through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but faith working through love."—Gal. v. 2-6.
This momentous question is brought forward with the greater emphasis and effect, because it has hitherto been kept out of sight. The allusion to Titus in ch. ii. 1-5 has already indicated the supreme importance of the matter of circumcision. But the Apostle has delayed dealing with it formally and directly, until he is able to do so with the weight of the foregoing chapters to support his interdict. He has shattered the enemies' position with his artillery of logic, he has assailed the hearts of his readers with all the force of his burning indignation and subduing pathos. Now he gathers up his strength for the final charge home, which must decide the battle.
I. Lo, I Paul tell you! When he begins thus, we feel that the decisive moment is at hand. Everything depends on the next few words. Paul stands like an archer with his bow drawn at full stretch and the arrow pointed to the mark. "Let others say what they may; this is what I tell you. If my word has any weight with you, give heed to this:—if you be circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing."
Now his bolt is shot; we see what the Apostle has
had in his mind all this time. Language cannot be
more explicit. Some of his readers will have failed to
catch the subtler points of his argument, or the finer
tones of his voice of entreaty; but every one will understand
this. The most "senseless" and volatile
This declaration is no less authoritative and judicially threatening than the anathema of ch. i. That former denouncement declared the false teachers severed from Christ. Those who yield to their persuasion, will be also "severed from Christ." They will fall into the same ditch as their blind leaders. The Judaizers have forfeited their part in Christ; they are false brethren, tares among the wheat, troublers and hinderers to the Church of God. And Gentile Christians who choose to be led astray by them must take the consequences. If they obey the "other gospel," Christ's gospel is theirs no longer. If they rest their faith on circumcision, they have withdrawn it from His cross. Adopting the Mosaic regimen, they forego the benefits of Christ's redemption. "Christ will profit you nothing." The sentence is negative, but no less fearful on that account. It is as though Christ should say, "Thou hast no part with Me."
Circumcision will cost the Galatian Christians all
they possess in Jesus Christ. But is not this, some
one will ask, an over-strained assertion? Is it consistent
with Paul's professions and his policy in other
instances? In ver. 6, and again in the last chapter,
he declares that "Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision
nothing"; and yet here he makes it everything!
The Apostle's position is this. In itself the
rite is valueless. It was the sacrament of the Old
Covenant, which was brought to an end by the death
With what views, with what aim were the Galatians
entertaining this Judaic "persuasion"? Was it to
make them sons of God and heirs of His kingdom?
This was the object with which "God sent forth His
Son;" and the Spirit of sonship assured them that it
was realised (ch. iv. 4-7). To adopt the former means
to this end was to renounce the latter. In turning
their eyes to this new bewitchment, they must be conscious
that their attention was diverted from the
The tense of the verb is present. Paul's readers may be in the act of making this disastrous compliance. He bids them look for a moment at the depth of the gulf on whose brink they stand. "Stop!" he cries, "another step in that direction, and you have lost Christ."
And what will they get in exchange? They will
saddle themselves with all the obligations of the Mosaic
law (ver. 3). This probably was more than they
bargained for. They wished to find a via media, some
compromise between the new faith and the old, which
would secure to them the benefits of Christ without
His reproach, and the privileges of Judaism without
its burdens. This at least was the policy of the Judaic
teachers (ch. vi. 12, 13). But it was a false and
untenable position. "Circumcision verily profiteth, if
thou art a doer of the law" (
Now this is a proved impossibility. Whoever "sets
up the law," he had avouched to Cephas, "makes himself
a transgressor" (ch. ii. 18). Nay, it was established
of set purpose to "multiply transgressions," to deepen
and sharpen the consciousness of sin (ch. iii. 19;
This double threatening is blended into one in ver. 4. Comp.
Cut off from Christ, they "have fallen from grace."
Paul has already twice identified Christ and grace, in
ch. i. 6 and ii. 21. The Divine mercies centre in
Jesus Christ; and he who separates himself from Him,
shuts these out of his soul. The verb here used by
the Apostle (�ξε�έσατε) is commonly applied (four
times e.g. in Comp. 2 Pet. iii. 17; for the figure suggested,
That he who "seeks justification in law has fallen
from grace," needs no proof after the powerful demonstration
of ch. ii. 14-21. The moralist claims quittance
on the ground of his deservings. He pleads
the quality of his "works," his punctual discharge of
every stipulated duty, from circumcision onwards. "I
fast twice a week," he tells his Divine Judge; "I tithe
all my gains. I have kept all the commandments from
my youth up." What can God expect more than this?
But with these performances Grace has nothing to do.
The man is not in its order. If he invokes its aid, it is
as a make-weight, a supplement to the possible shortcomings
in a virtue for the most part competent for
itself. Now the grace of God is not to be set aside in
this way; it refuses to be treated as a mere succedaneum
of human virtue. Grace, like Christ, insists on
being "all in all." "If salvation is by grace, it is no
longer of works;" and "if of works, it is no more
grace" (
II. From this prospect the Apostle bids his readers turn to that which he himself beholds, and which they erewhile shared with him. Again he seems to say, "Be ye as I am, brethren" (ch. iv. 12); not in outward condition alone, but still more in inward experience and aspiration. "For we by the Spirit, on the ground of faith, are awaiting the hope of righteousness" (ver. 5).
Look on this picture, and on that. Yonder are the Galatians, all in tumult about the legalistic proposals, debating which of the Hebrew feasts they shall celebrate and with what rites, absorbed in the details of Mosaic ceremony, all but persuaded to be circumcised and to settle their scruples out of hand by a blind submission to the Law. And here, on the other side, is Paul with the Church of the Spirit, walking in the righteousness of faith and the communion of the Holy Spirit, joyfully awaiting the Saviour's final coming and the hope that is laid up in heaven. How vexed, how burdened, how narrow and puerile is the one condition of life; how large and lofty and secure the other. "We," says the Apostle, "are looking forwards not backwards, to Christ and not to Moses."
Every word in this sentence is full of meaning.
Faith carries an emphasis similar to that it has in
ch. ii. 16; iii. 22; and in
The Apostle is always true to the order of thought
here indicated. Faith saves from first to last. The
present righteousness and future glory of the sons of
God alike have their source in faith. The act of reliance
by which the initial justification of the sinner was
attained, now becomes the habit of the soul, the channel
by which its life is fed, rooting itself ever more deeply
into Christ and absorbing more completely the virtue of
His death and heavenly life. Faith has its great
ventures; it has also its seasons of endurance, its
moods of quiet expectancy, its unweariable patience.
It can wait as well as work. It rests upon the past,
seeing in Christ crucified its "author;" then it looks
on to the future, and claims Christ glorified for its
"finisher." So faith prompts her sister Hope and
points her to "the glory that shall be revealed." If
faith fails, hope quickly dies. Unbelief is the mother
A second condition, inseparable from the first, marks
the hope proper to the Christian righteousness. It is
sustained "by the Spirit." The connection of faith
and hope respectively with the gift of the Holy Spirit
is marked very clearly by Paul in
If faith and hope are in sight, love cannot be far off.
In the next verse it comes to claim its place beside the
other two: "faith working through love." And so the
blessed trio is complete, Fides, amor, spes: summa
Christianismi (Bengel). Faith waits, but it also works; "Working through love," not wrought (R.V. margin). The latter
rendering of the participle is found in some of the Fathers, and is preferred
by Romanist interpreters in the interest of their doctrine of fides
formata. Paul's theology and his verbal usage alike require the middle
sense of this verb, adopted by modern commentators with one consent.
The middle voice implies that through love faith gets into action,
is operative, efficacious, shows what it can do. Comp., for Pauline usage,
These closing words are of no little theological
importance. "They bridge over the gulf which seems
to separate the language of Paul and James. Both
assert a principle of practical energy, as opposed to a
barren, inactive theory" (Lightfoot). Had the faith of
Paul's readers been more practical, had they been of
a diligent, enterprising spirit, "ready for every good
word and work," they would not have felt, to the same
degree, the spell of the Judaistic fascination. Idle hands,
vain and restless minds, court temptation. A manly,
energetic faith will never play at ritualism or turn
religion into a round of ceremonial, an æsthetic exhibition.
Loving and self-devoting faith in Christ is the one
thing Paul covets to see in the Galatians. This is the
working power of the gospel, the force that will lift and
regenerate mankind. In comparison with this, questions
of Church-order and forms of worship are
"nothing." "The body is more than the raiment."
Church organization is a means to a certain end; and
that end consists in the life of faith and love in
Christian souls. Each man is worth to Christ and to
The Apostle wishes it to be understood that he does not condemn circumcision on its own account, as though the opposite condition were in itself superior. If "circumcision does not avail anything, neither does uncircumcision." The Jew is no better or worse a Christian because he is circumcised; the Gentile no worse or better, because he is not. This difference in no way affects the man's spiritual standing or efficiency. Let the Galatians dismiss the whole question from their minds. "One thing is needful," to be filled with the Spirit of love. "God's kingdom is not meat and drink;" it is not "days and seasons and years;" it is not circumcision, nor rubrics and vestments and priestly functions; it is "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." These are the true notes of the Church; "by love," said Christ, "all men will know that you are My disciples."
In these two sentences (vv. 5 and 6) the religion
of Christ is summed up. Ver. 5 gives us its statics;
ver. 6 its dynamics. It is a condition, and an occupation;
a grand outlook, and an intent pursuit; a Divine
hope for the future, and a sovereign power for the
present, with an infinite spring of energy in the love of
Christ. The active and passive elements of the Christian
life need to be justly balanced. Many of the errors of
the Church have arisen from one-sidedness in this
respect. Some do nothing but sit with folded hands
till the Lord comes; others are too busy to think of
His coming at all. So waiting degenerates into indolence;
"These three abide—faith, hope, and love." They cannot change while God is God and man is man. Forms of dogma and of worship have changed and must change. There is a perpetual "removing of the things that are shaken, as of things that are made;" but through all revolutions there "remain the things which are not shaken." To these let us rally. On these let us build. New questions thrust themselves to the front, touching matters as little essential to the Church's life as that of circumcision in the Apostolic age. The evil is that we make so much of them. In the din of controversy we grow bewildered; our eyes are blinded with its dust; our souls chafed with its fretting. We lose the sense of proportion; we fail to see who are our true friends, and who our foes. We need to return to the simplicity that is in Christ. Let us "consider Him"—Christ incarnate, dying, risen, reigning—till we are changed into the same image, till His life has wrought itself into ours. Then these questions of dispute will fall into their proper place. They will resolve themselves; or wait patiently for their solution. Loyalty to Jesus Christ is the only solvent of our controversies.
Will the Galatians be true to Christ? Or will they renounce their righteousness in Him for a legal status, morally worthless, and which will end in taking from them the hope of eternal life? They have nothing to gain, they have everything to lose in submitting to circumcision.
"Ye were running well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth? This persuasion came not of him that calleth you. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. I have confidence to you-ward, in the Lord, that ye will be none otherwise minded: but he that troubleth you shall bear his judgement, whosoever he be. But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? then hath the stumblingblock of the cross been done away. I would that they which unsettle you would even mutilate themselves."—Gal. v. 7-12.
This section is made up of short, disconnected
sentences, shot off in various directions; as though the
writer wished to have done with the Judaistic debate,
and would discharge at a single volley the arrows
There lie before us therefore in this paragraph the following considerations:—Paul's hope concerning the Galatian Churches, his protest on his own behalf, and finally, his judgement respecting the troublers.
I. The more hopeful strain of the letter at this point
appears to be due to the effect of his argument upon
the writer's own mind. As the breadth and grandeur
of the Christian faith open out before him, and he
contrasts its spiritual glory with the ignoble aims of
the Circumcisionists, Paul cannot think that the readers
will any longer doubt which is the true gospel. Surely
they will be disenchanted. His irrefragable reasonings,
his pleading entreaties and solemn warnings are bound
to call forth a response from a people so intelligent and
so affectionate. "For my part," he says, "I am confident
in the Lord that you will be no otherwise minded
(ver. 10), that you will be faithful to your Divine calling,
despite the hindrances thrown in your way." They
will, he is persuaded, come to see the proposals of the
Judaizers in their proper light. They will think about
"In the Lord" Paul cherishes this confidence. "In
Christ's grace" the Galatians were called to enter the
kingdom of God (ver. 8; ch. i. 6); and He was concerned
that the work begun in them should be completed
( See Chapter I, pp. 15, 16, on the date of the Epistle.
Another remembrance quickens the feeling of hope
with which the Apostle draws the conflict to a close.
He reminds himself of the good confession the Galatians
had aforetime witnessed, Comp. ch. iii. 4: "ye suffered so many things."
There is kindness and true wisdom in this encouragement. The Apostle has "told them the truth;" he has "reproved with all authority;" now that this is done, their remains nothing in his heart but good-will and good wishes for his Galatian children. If his chiding has wrought the effect it was intended to produce, then these words of softened admonition will be grateful and healing. They have "stumbled, but not that they might fall." The Apostle holds out the hand of restoration; his confidence animates them to hope better things for themselves. He turns his anger away from them, and directs it altogether upon their injurers.
II. The Judaizers had troubled the Churches of Galatia; they had also maligned the Apostle Paul. From them undoubtedly the imputation proceeded which he repudiates so warmly in ver. 11: "And I, brethren, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still persecuted?" This supposition a moment's reflection would suffice to refute. The contradiction was manifest. The persecution which everywhere followed the Apostle marked him out in all men's eyes as the adversary of Legalism.
There were circumstances, however, that lent a
certain colour to this calumny. The circumcision of
Timothy, for instance, might be thought to look in this
direction (
This was an entirely different thing from "preaching
circumcision" in the legalist sense, from heralding
(κη�ύσσω: ver. 11) and crying up the Jewish ordinance,
and making it a religious duty. This difference the
Circumcisionists affected not to understand. Some of
Paul's critics will not understand it even now. They
argue that the Apostle's hostility to Judaism in this
Epistle discredits the narrative of the Acts of the
Apostles, inasmuch as the latter relates several instances
of Jewish conformity on his part. What pragmatical
narrowness is this! Paul's adversaries said, "He
derides Judaism amongst you Gentiles, who know
nothing of his antecedents, or of his practice in other
places. But when he pleases, this liberal Paul will be
as zealous for circumcision as any of us. Indeed he
boasts of his skill in 'becoming all things to all men;'
he trims his sail to every breeze. In Galatia he is all
breadth and tolerance; he talks about our 'liberty
which we have in Christ Jesus;' he is ready to 'become
Paul's position was a delicate one, and open to misrepresentation. Men of party insist on this or that external custom as the badge of their own side; they have their party-colours and their uniform. Men of principle adopt or lay aside such usages with a freedom which scandalizes the partisan. What right, he says, has any one to wear our colours, to pronounce our shibboleth, if he is not one of ourselves? If the man will not be with us, let him be against us. Had Paul renounced his circumcision and declared himself a Gentile out and out, the Judaists might have understood him. Had he said, Circumcision is evil, they could have endured it better; but to preach that Circumcision is nothing, to reduce this all-important rite to insignificance, vexed them beyond measure. It was in their eyes plain proof of dishonesty. They tell the Galatians that Paul is playing a double part, that his resistance to their circumcision is interested and insincere.
The charge is identical with that of "man-pleasing"
which the Apostle repelled in ch. i. 10 (see Chapter III).
The emphatic "still" of that passage recurs twice in
this, bearing the same meaning as it does there. Its
force is not temporal, as though the Apostle were
thinking of a former time when he did "preach circumcision:"
no such reference appears in the context, and
these terms are inappropriate to his pre-Christian career.
The particle points a logical contrast, as e.g. in
The rancour of the Legalists was sufficient proof of
Paul's sincerity. They were themselves guilty of the
baseness with which they taxed him. It was in order
to escape the reproach of the cross (ver. 11), to atone
for their belief in the Nazarene, that they persuaded
Gentile Christians to be circumcised (ch. vi. 11, 12).
They were the man-pleasers. The Judaizers knew
perfectly well that the Apostle's observance of Jewish
usage was no endorsement of their principles. The
print of the Jewish scourge upon his back attested his
loyalty to Gentile Christendom (ch. vi. 17;
But he says, "the scandal of the cross"—that scandalous, Comp. Chapter XII, pp. 193-4.
This was true historically. The crime of national Judaism in slaying its Messiah was capital. Its spiritual blindness and its moral failure had received the most signal proof. The congregation of Israel had become a synagogue of Satan. And these were "the chosen people," the world's élite, who "crucified the Lord of glory!" Mankind had done this thing. The world has "both seen and hated both Him and the Father." Now to set up circumcision again, or any kind of human effort or performance, as a ground of justification before God, is to ignore this judgement; it is to make void the sentence which the cross of Christ has passed upon all "works of righteousness which we have done." This teaching sorely offends moralists and ceremonialists, of whatever age or school; it is "the offence of the cross."
And further, as matter of Divine appointment the
sacrifice of Calvary put an end to Jewish ordinances.
Their significance was gone. The Epistle to the
Hebrews developes this consequence at length in other
directions. For himself the Apostle views it from a
single and very definite standpoint. The Law, he says,
had brought on men a curse; it stimulated sin to its
worst developments (ch. iii. 10, 19). Christ's death
under this curse has expiated and removed it for us
(ch. iii. 13). His atonement met man's guilt in its
culmination. The Law had not prevented—nay, it gave
occasion to the crime; it necessitated, but could not
provide expiation, which was supplied "outside the
law" (
This dilemma the Circumcisionists would fain escape.
They fought shy of Calvary. Like some later moralists,
they did not see why the cross should be always
pushed to the front, and its offence forced upon the world.
Surely there was in the wide range of Christian truth
abundance of other profitable topics to discuss, without
wounding Jewish susceptibilities in this way. But
this endeavour of theirs is just what Paul is determined
to frustrate. He confronts Judaism at every turn with
that dreadful cross. He insists that it shall be realised
in its horror and its shame, that men shall feel the
tremendous shock which it gives to the moral conceit,
In later days the death of Christ has been made void in other ways. It is veiled in the steam of our incense. It is invested with the halo of a sensuous glorification. The cross has been for many turned into an artistic symbol, a beautiful idol, festooned with garlands, draped in poetry, but robbed of its spiritual meaning, its power to humble and to save. Let men see it "openly set forth," in its naked terror and majesty, that they may know what they are and what their sins have done.
We rely on birth and good breeding, on art and
education as instruments of moral progress. Improved
social arrangements, a higher environment, these, we
think, will elevate the race. Within their limits these
forces are invaluable; they are ordained of God. But
they are only law at the best. When they have done
their utmost, they leave man still unsaved—proud,
selfish, unclean, miserable. To rest human salvation
on self-improvement and social reform, is legalism over
again. To civilise is not to regenerate. These
methods were tried in Mosaism, under circumstances
in many respects highly favourable. "The scandal
of the cross" was the result. Education and social
discipline may produce a Pharisee, nothing higher.
Legislation and environment work from the outside.
They cannot touch the essential human heart. Nothing
has ever done this like the cross of Jesus Christ. He
who "makes it of none effect," whether in the name
III. We are now in a position to estimate more precisely the character and motives of the Judaistic party, the hinderers and troublers of this Epistle.
In the first place, it appears that they had entered the Galatian communities from without. The fact that they are called troublers (disturbers) of itself suggests this (ver. 10; ch. i. 7). They came with a professed "gospel," as messengers bringing new tidings; the Apostle compares them to himself, the first Galatian evangelist, "or an angel from heaven" (ch. i. 8, 9). He glances at them in his reference to "false brethren" at an earlier time "brought into (the Gentile Church) unawares" (ch. ii. 4). These men are "courting" the favour of Paul's Galatian disciples, endeavouring to gain them over in his absence (ch. iv. 17, 18). They have made misleading statements respecting his early career and relations to the Church, which he is at pains to correct. They professed to represent the views of the Pillars at Jerusalem, and quoted their authority against the Apostle Paul.
From these considerations we infer that "the
troublers" were Judaistic emissaries from Palestine.
The second Epistle to Corinth, contemporaneous with
this letter, reveals the existence of a similar propaganda
in the Greek capital at the same period. Paul had
given the Galatians warning on the subject at his last
visit (ch. i. 9). There were already, we should suppose,
in the Galatian societies, before the arrival of the
Judaizers, Jewish believers in Christ of legalistic
tendencies, prepared to welcome and support the new
teachers. But it was the coming of these agitators from
The allusion made in chap. ii. 12 to "certain from
James," Compare Chapter IX, pp. 131-4. We refer this occurrence to the
interval between the second and third of Paul's missionary journeys
(
The vitiating "leaven" at work in the spiritual life of
the Galatians, if not arrested, would soon "leaven the
whole lump." The Apostle applies to the Judaistic
doctrine the same figure under which he described the
Against the wilful perverters of the gospel the
Apostle at the outset delivered his anathema. For
these Circumcisionists in particular he has one further
wish to express. It is a grim sort of suggestion, to
be read rather by way of sarcasm than in the strict
letter of fulfilment. The devotees of circumcision, he
means to say, might as well go a step farther. If the
physical mark of Judaism, the mere surgical act, is so
salutary, why not "cut off" the member altogether,
like the emasculated priests of Cybelé? (ver. 12). The rendering of the R.V. margin is that of all the Greek interpreters,
and of Meyer, Lightfoot, Beet, and the strict grammatical
commentators amongst the moderns. The form and usage of the verb
do not allow of any other. Apart from its unseemliness, the expression
is powerfully appropriate. This condemnation of the Old-Testament
sacrament is not more severe than the language of
This mockery, though not to be judged by modern
sentiment, in any case went to the verge of what
charity and decency permit. It breathes a burning
contempt for the Judaizing policy. It shows how
utterly circumcision had lost its sacredness for the
Apostle. Its spiritual import being gone, it was now
a mere "concision" (
Such language was well calculated to disgust Gentile Christians with the rite of circumcision. It helps to account for the implacable hatred with which Paul was regarded by orthodox Jews. It accords with what he intimated in ch. iv. 9, to the effect that Jewish conformity was for the Gentiles in effect heathenish. Apart from its relation to the obsolete Mosaic covenant, circumcision was in itself no holier than the deformities inflicted by Paganism on its votaries.
The Judaizers are finally described, not merely as
"troublers" and "hinderers," but as "those that
unsettle you"—or more strongly still, "overthrow you."
The Greek word (ἀναστατέω) occurs in
"For ye, brethren, were called for freedom; only use not your freedom for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants one to another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."—Gal. v. 13-15.
It applies the maxim of ver. 6, "Faith works through
love"; it reminds the Galatians how they had "received
the Spirit of God" (ch. iii. 2, 3; iv. 6). The
rancours and jealousies opposed to love, the carnal
mind that resists the Spirit—these are the objects of
Paul's dehortations. The moral disorders which the
Apostle seeks to correct arose largely out of the mischief
caused by the Judaizers. And his exhortations to love
and good works are themselves indirectly polemical.
They vindicate Paul's gospel from the charge of antinomianism,
while they guard Christians from giving
I. Here lies the danger of liberty, especially when conferred on a young, untrained nature, and in a newly emancipated community.
Freedom is a priceless boon; but it is a grave responsibility.
It has its temptations, as well as its joys
and dignities. The Apostle has spoken at length of
the latter: it is the former that he has now to urge.
Keep your liberties, he seems to say; for Christ's sake
and for truth's sake hold them fast, guard them well.
You are God's regenerated sons. Never forego your
high calling. God is on your side; and those who
assail you shall feel the weight of His displeasure.
Yes, "stand fast" in the liberty wherewith "Christ
made you free." But take care how you employ your
freedom; "only use not liberty for an occasion to the
The man, or the nation that has won its freedom, has won but half the battle. It has conquered external foes; it has still to prevail over itself. And this is the harder task. Men clamour for liberty, when they mean licence; what they seek is the liberty of the flesh, not of the Spirit, freedom to indulge their lusts and to trample on the rights of others, the freedom of outlaws and brigands. The natural man defines freedom as the power to do as he likes; not the right of self-regulation, but the absence of regulation is what he desires. And this is just what the Spirit of God will never allow (ver. 17). When such a man has thrown off outward constraint and the dread of punishment, there is no inward law to take its place. It is his greed, his passion, his pride and ambition that call for freedom; not his conscience. And to all such libertarians our Saviour says, "He that committeth sin is the slave of sin." No tyrant is so vile, so insatiable as our own self-indulged sin. A pitiable triumph, for a man to have secured his religious liberty only to become the thrall of his vices!
It is possible that some men accepted the gospel
under the delusion that it afforded a shelter for sin.
The sensualist, deterred from his indulgences by fear
In the view of Legalism, this is the natural outcome
of Pauline teaching. From the first it has been charged
with fostering lawlessness. In the Lutheran Reformation
Rome pointed to the Antinomians, and moralists
of our own day speak of "canting Evangelicals," just
This possibility is, however, a reason for the utmost
watchfulness in those who are stewards in the administration
of the gospel. They must be careful, like Paul,
to make it abundantly clear that they "establish" and
do not "make void law through faith" (
II. Faith in Christ gives in truth a new efficacy to the moral law. For it works through love; and love fulfils all laws in one (vv. 13b, 14). Where faith has this operation, liberty is safe; not otherwise. Love's slaves are the true freemen.
The legalist practically takes the same view of human
nature as the sensualist. He knows nothing of "the
desire of the Spirit" arrayed against that of the flesh
(ver. 17), nothing of the mastery over the heart that
belongs to the love of Christ. In his analysis the soul
consists of so many desires, each blindly seeking its
own gratification, which must be drilled into order
Judaism is a proof that this scheme of life is impracticable. For the Pharisaic system which produced such deplorable moral results, was an experiment in external ethics. It was in fact the application of a highly developed and elaborate traditional code of law, enforced by the strongest outward sanctions, without personal loyalty to the Divine Lawgiver. In the national conscience of the Jews this was wanting. Their faith in God, as the Epistle of James declares, was a "dead" faith, a bundle of abstract notions. Loyalty is true law-keeping. And loyalty springs from the personal relationship of the subject and the law-making power. This nexus Christian sonship supplies, in its purest and most exalted form. When I see in the Lawgiver my Almighty Father, when the law has become incarnate in the person of my Saviour, my heart's King and Lord, it wears a changed aspect. "His commandments are not grievous." Duty, required by Him, is honour and delight. No abstract law, no "stream of tendency" can command the homage or awaken the moral energy that is inspired by "the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Here the Apostle traverses antinomian deductions
from his doctrine of liberty. In the Epistle to the
Romans (ch. vi.) he deals at length with the theoretical
objection to his teaching on this subject. He shows
there that salvation by faith, rightly understood and
experienced, renders continuance in sin impossible.
For faith in Christ is in effect the union of the soul with
Christ, first in His death, and then consequently in His
risen life, wherein He lives only "to God." Nay,
Christ Himself lives in the believing man (
At this point Paul throws in one of his bold paradoxes.
He has been contending all through the Epistle
for freedom, bidding his readers scorn the legal yoke,
breathing into them his own contempt for the pettiness
of Judaistic ceremonial. But now he turns round
suddenly and bids them be slaves: "but let love," he
says, "make you bondmen to each other" (ver. 13).
Instead of breaking bonds, he seeks to create stronger
bonds, stronger because dearer. Paul preaches no
gospel of individualism, of egotistic salvation-seeking.
The self-sacrifice of Christ becomes in turn a principle
of sacrifice in those who receive it. Paul's own ideal
And love is ever conqueror. To it toil and endurance that mock the achievement of other powers, are a light thing. Needing neither bribe nor threat, love labours, waits, braves a thousand dangers, keeps the hands busy, the eye keen and watchful, the feet running to and fro untired through the longest day. There is no industry, no ingenuity like that of love. Love makes the mother the slave of the babe at her breast, and wins from the friend for his friend service that no compulsion could exact, rendered in pure gladness and free-will. Its power alone calls forth what is best and strongest in us all. Love is mightier than death. In Jesus Christ, love has "laid down life for its friends"; the fulness of life has encountered and overcome the uttermost of death. Love esteems it bondage to be prevented, liberty only to be allowed to serve.
Without love, freedom is an empty boon. It brings no ease, no joy of heart. It is objectless and listless. Bereft of faith and love, though possessing the most perfect independence, the soul drifts along like a ship rudderless and masterless, with neither haven nor horizon. Wordsworth, in his Ode to Duty, has finely expressed the weariness that comes of such liberty, unguided by an inward law and a Divine ideal:
But on the other hand,
This "royal law" (
It is remarkable that this supreme principle of
Christian ethics is first enunciated in the most legal
part of the Old Testament. Leviticus is the Book of
the Priestly Legislation. It is chiefly occupied with
ceremonial and civil regulations. Yet in the midst of
the legal minutiæ is set this sublime and simple rule,
than which Jesus Christ could prescribe nothing more
Divine: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (
The law, therefore, opposed and cast out in the name
of faith, is brought in again under the shield of love.
"If ye love Me," said Jesus, "keep my commandments."
Love reconciles law and faith. Law by itself can but
prohibit this and that injury to one's neighbour, when
they are likely to arise. Love excludes the doing of
any injury; it "worketh no ill to its neighbour, therefore
love is the fulfilling of the law" (
"What law could not do," with all its multiplied
enactments and redoubled threats, faith "working by
love" has accomplished at a stroke. "The righteousness
of the law is fulfilled in those who walk not after
the flesh, but after the Spirit" (
Paul does not therefore override the law in the interest of faith. Quite the contrary, he establishes, he magnifies it. His theology rests on the idea of Righteousness, which is strictly a legal conception. But he puts the law in its proper place. He secures for it the alliance of love. The legalist, desiring to exalt law, in reality stultifies it. Striving to make it omnipotent, he makes it impotent. In the Apostle's teaching, law is the rule, faith the spring of action. Law marks the path, love gives the will and power to follow it. Who then are the truest friends of law—Legalists or Paulinists, moralists or evangelicals?
III. Alas, the Galatians at the present moment afford
These Asiatic Gauls were men of a warm temperament, quick to resent wrong and prone to imagine it. The dissensions excited by the Judaic controversy had excited their combative temper to an unusual degree. "Biting" describes the wounding and exasperating effect of the manner in which their contentions were carried on; "devour" warns them of its destructiveness. Taunts were hurled across the field of debate; vituperation supplied the lack of argument. Differences of opinion engendered private feuds and rankling injuries. In Corinth the spirit of discord had taken a factious form. It arrayed men in conflicting parties, with their distinctive watchwords and badges and sectional platforms. In these Churches it bore fruit in personal affronts and quarrels, in an angry, vindictive temper, which spread through the Galatian societies and broke out in every possible form of contention (v. 20). If this state of things continued, the Churches of Galatia would cease to exist. Their liberty would end in complete disintegration.
Like some other communities, the Galatian Christians
were oscillating between despotism and anarchy;
they had not attained the equilibrium of a sober, ordered
liberty, the freedom of a manly self-control. They had
not sufficient respect either for their own or for each
other's rights. Some men must be bridled or they will
"bite;" they must wear the yoke or they run wild.
They are incapable of being a law unto themselves.
They have not faith enough to make them steadfast,
The problem of the nature and conditions of Christian liberty occupies the Apostle's mind in different ways in all the letters of this period. The young Churches of the Gentiles were in the gravest peril. They had come out of Egypt to enter the Promised Land, the heritage of the sons of God. The Judaists sought to turn them aside into the Sinaitic wilderness of Mosaism; while their old habits and associations powerfully tended to draw them back into heathen immorality. Legalism and licence were the Scylla and Charybdis on either hand, between which it needed the most firm and skilful pilotage to steer the bark of the Church. The helm of the vessel is in Paul's hands. And, through the grace of God, he did not fail in his task. It is in the love of Christ that the Apostle found his guiding light. "Love," he has written, "never faileth."
Love is the handmaid of faith, and the firstborn fruit
of the Spirit of Christ (vv. 6, 22). Blending with the
law, love refashions it, changing it into its own image.
Thus moulded and transfigured, law is no longer an
exterior yoke, a system of restraint and penalty; it
becomes an inner, sweet constraint. Upon the child
of God it acts as an organic and formative energy, the
principle of his regenerated being, which charges with
its renovating influence all the springs of life. Evil
[He showeth the battell of the flesh and the Spirit; and the fruits of them both. Heading in Genevan Bible.]
"But I say, Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would. But if ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law.... And they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof. If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk. Let us not be vainglorious, provoking one another, envying one another."—Gal. v. 16-26.
From the first of these two factors of Christian ethics
the Apostle passes in ver. 16 to the second. He conducts
us from the consequence to the cause, from the
human aspect of spiritual freedom to the Divine. Love,
he has said, fulfils all laws in one. It casts out evil
from the heart; it stays the injurious hand and tongue;
and makes it impossible for liberty to give the rein to
any wanton or selfish impulse. But the law of love is
no natural, automatic impulse. It is a Divine inspiration.
The word Spirit (πνεύματι) is written indefinitely;
but the Galatians knew well what Spirit the Apostle
meant. It is "the Spirit" of whom he has spoken so
often in this letter, the Holy Spirit of God, who had
entered their hearts when they first believed in Christ
and taught them to call God Father. He gave them
their freedom: He will teach them how to use it. The
absence of the definite article in Pneuma does not
destroy its personal force, but allows it at the same
time a broad, qualitative import, corresponding to that
of the opposed "desire of the flesh." The walk
governed "by the Spirit" is a spiritual walk. As for
the interpretation of the dative case (rendered variously
by, or in, or even for the Spirit), that is determined by
the meaning of the noun itself. "The Spirit" is not
the path "in" which one walks; rather He supplies
the motive principle, the directing influence of the new
life. The construction of ch. vi. 16;
This conception of the indwelling Spirit of God as
the actuating power of the Christian's moral life predominates
I. "I say, Walk by the Spirit, and you will verily not fulfil the lust of the flesh." On what ground does this bold assurance rest? Because, the Apostle replies, the Spirit and the flesh are opposites (ver. 17). Each is bent on destroying the ascendency of the other. Their cravings and tendencies stand opposed at every point. Where the former rules, the latter must succumb. "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh."
The verb lust in Greek, as in English, bears
commonly an evil sense; but not necessarily so, nor
by derivation. It is a sad proof of human corruption
that in all languages words denoting strong desire tend
to an impure significance. Paul extends to "the
desire of the Spirit" the term which has just been used
of "the lust of the flesh," in this way sharpening the
antithesis. Comp.
The opposition here affirmed exists on the widest scale. All history is a battlefield for the struggle between God's Spirit and man's rebellious flesh. In the soul of a half-sanctified Christian, and in Churches like those of Corinth and Galatia whose members are "yet carnal and walk as men," the conflict is patent. The Spirit of Christ has established His rule in the heart; but His supremacy is challenged by the insurrection of the carnal powers. The contest thus revived in the soul of the Christian is internecine; it is that of the kingdoms of light and darkness, of the opposite poles of good and evil. It is an incident in the war of human sin against the Holy Spirit of God, which extends over all time and all human life. Every lust, every act or thought of evil is directed, knowingly or unknowingly, against the authority of the Holy Spirit, against the presence and the rights of God immanent in the creature. Nor is there any restraint upon evil, any influence counteracting it in man or nation or race, which does not proceed from the Spirit of the Lord. The spirit of man has never been without a Divine Paraclete. "God hath not left Himself without witness" to any; and "it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth." The Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit, is the Spirit of all truth and holiness. In the "truth as it is in Jesus" He possesses His highest instrument. But from the beginning it was His office to be God's Advocate, to uphold law, to convict the conscience, to inspire the hope of mercy, to impart moral strength and freedom. We "believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life."
This war of Spirit and Flesh is first ostensibly
With the advent of Christ all this is changed. The
Spirit of God is now, for the first time, sent forth in
His proper character and His full energy. At last His
victory draws near. He comes as the Spirit of Christ
and the Father, "poured out upon all flesh." "A new
heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within
you. I will put My Spirit within you" (
But what does Paul really mean by "the flesh?"
It includes everything that is not "of the Spirit." It
signifies the entire potency of sin. It is the contra-spiritual,
the undivine in man. Its "works," as we
find in vv. 20, 21, are not bodily vices only, but See
On this definition of the terms, it is manifest that
the antagonism of the Flesh and Spirit is fundamental.
They can never come to terms with each other, nor
dwell permanently in the same being. Sin must be
extirpated, or the Holy Spirit will finally depart. The
struggle must come to a definitive issue. Human
character tends every day to a more determinate form;
and an hour comes in each case when the victory of
flesh or spirit is irrevocably fixed, when "the filthy"
will henceforth "be filthy still," and "the holy, holy
still" (
The last clause of ver. 17, "that ye may not do the things that ye would," has been variously interpreted. The rendering of the Authorized Version ("so that ye cannot") is perilously misleading. Is it that the flesh prevents the Galatians doing the good they would? Or is the Spirit to prevent them doing the evil they otherwise would? Or are both these oppositions in existence at once, so that they waver between good and evil, leading a partly spiritual, partly carnal life, consistent neither in right nor wrong? The last is the actual state of the case. Paul is perplexed about them (ch. iv. 20); they are in doubt about themselves. They did not "walk in the Spirit," they were not true to their Christian principles; the flesh was too strong for that. Nor would they break away from Christ and follow the bent of their lower nature; the Holy Spirit held them back from doing this. So they have two wills,—or practically none. This state of things was designed by God,—"in order that ye may not do the things ye haply would;" it accords with the methods of His government. Irresolution is the necessary effect of the course the Galatians had pursued. So far they stopped short of apostasy; and this restraint witnessed to the power of the Holy Spirit still at work in their midst (ch. iii. 5; vi. 1). Let this Divine hand cease to check them, and the flesh would carry them, with the full momentum of their will, to spiritual ruin. Their condition is just now one of suspense. They are poised in a kind of moral equilibrium, which cannot continue long, but in which, while it lasts, the action of the conflicting forces of Flesh and Spirit is strikingly manifest.
II. These two principles in their development lead to entirely opposite results.
(1) The works of the flesh—"manifest" alas, both then and now—exclude from the kingdom of God. "I tell you beforehand," the Apostle writes, "as I have already told you: they who practise such things will not inherit God's kingdom" (v. 21).
This warning is essential to Paul's gospel (
"If children, then heirs." Future destiny turns upon
present character. The Spirit of God's Son, with His
fruit of love and peace, is "the earnest of our inheritance,
sealing us against the day of redemption" (
Writing to the Corinthians, Paul entreats his readers
not to be deceived upon this point (
(2) Of the opposite principle the Apostle states not the ultimate, but the more immediate consequences. "Led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law" (ver. 18); and "Against such things—love, peace, goodness, and the like—there is no law" (ver. 23).
The declaration of ver. 18 is made with a certain
abruptness. Paul has just said, in ver. 17, that the
Spirit is the appointed antagonist of the flesh. And
now he adds, that if we yield ourselves to His influence
we shall be no longer under the law. This
identification of sin and the law was established in
ch. ii. 16-18; iii. 10-22. The law by itself, the
Apostle showed, does not overcome sin, but aggravates
it; it shuts men up the hopeless prisoners of
their own past mis-doing. To be "under law" is to
be in the position of Ishmael, the slave-born and finally
outcast son, whose nature and temper are of the flesh
(ch. iv. 21-31). After all this we can understand his
writing law for sin in this passage, just as in
The phrase "under law" reminds us once more of
the imperilled liberty of the Galatians. Their spiritual
freedom and their moral safety were assailed in
common. In ver. 16 he had said, "Let the Holy
Spirit guide you, and you will vanquish sin"; and
Law therefore, in its Judaistic sense and application,
has been abolished since "faith has come." No
longer does it rule the soul by fear and compulsion.
This office, necessary once for the infant heirs of the
Covenant, it has no right to exercise over spiritual
men. Law cannot give life (ch. iii. 21). This is
the prerogative of the Spirit of God. Law says,
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God;" but it never
inspired such love in any man's breast. If he does so
love, the law approves him, without claiming credit to
itself for the fact. If he does not love his God, law
condemns him and brands him a transgressor. But
"the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the
Holy Ghost." The teaching of this paragraph on the
relation of the believer in Christ to God's law is
summed up in the words of
III. We see then that deliverance from sin belongs not to the subjects of the law, but to the freemen of the Spirit. This deliverance, promised in ver. 16, is declared in ver. 24 as an accomplished fact. "Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.... They that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and its lusts." The tyranny of the flesh is ended for those who are "in Christ Jesus." His cross has slain their sins. The entrance of His Spirit imports the death of all carnal affections.
"They who are Christ's did crucify the flesh."
This is the moral application of Paul's mystical doctrine,
central to all his theology, of the believer's union
with the Redeemer (see Chapter X, pp. 156-160).
"Christ in me—I in Him:" there is Paul's secret.
He was "one spirit" with Jesus Christ—dying, risen,
ascended, reigning, returning in glory. His old self,
his old world was dead and gone—slain by Christ's
cross, buried in His grave (ch. ii. 20; vi. 14). And
the flesh, common to the evil world and the evil self—that
above all was crucified. The death of shame and
legal penalty, the curse of God had overtaken it in the
death of Jesus Christ. Christ has risen, the "Lord of
the Spirit" (
What was then accomplished in principle when
"One died for all," is realised in point of fact when
we are "baptized into His death"—when, that is to
say, faith makes His death ours and its virtue passes
into the soul. The scene of the cross is inwardly
rehearsed. The wounds which pierced the Redeemer's
flesh and spirit now pierce our consciences. It is a
veritable crucifixion through which the soul enters into
communion with its risen Saviour, and learns to live
His life. Nor is its sanctification complete till it is
"conformed unto His death" (
Let the Galatians consider what their calling of God signified. Let them recall the prospects which opened before them in the days of their first faith in Christ, the love that glowed in their hearts, the energy with which the Holy Spirit wrought upon their nature. Let them know how truly they were called to liberty, and in good earnest were made sons of God. They have only to continue as heretofore to be led by the Spirit of Christ and to march forward along the path on which they had entered, and neither Jewish law nor their own lawless flesh will be able to bring them into bondage. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Where He is not, there is legalism, or licence; or, it may be, both at once.
"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, parties, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I forewarn you, even as I did forewarn you, that they which practise such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God."—Gal. v. 19-21.
Paul's enumeration of the current vices in this passage
has however a character of its own. It differs
I. "The works of the flesh are these—fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness." A dark beginning! Sins of impurity find a place in every picture of Gentile morals given by the Apostle. In whatever direction he writes—to Romans or Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, or Thessalonians—it is always necessary to warn against these evils. They are equally "manifest" in heathen literature. The extent to which they stain the pages of the Greek and Roman classics sets a heavy discount against their value as instruments of Christian education. Civilised society in Paul's day was steeped in sexual corruption.
Fornication was practically universal. Few were
found, even among severe moralists, to condemn it.
The overthrow of the splendid classical civilisation, due
to the extinction of manly virtues in the dominant race,
In writing to Corinth, the metropolis of Greek licentiousness,
Paul deals very solemnly and explicitly with
this vice. He teaches that this sin, above others, is
committed "against the man's own body." It is a
prostitution of the physical nature which Jesus Christ
wore and still wears, which He claims for the temple
of His Spirit, and will raise from the dead to share
His immortality. Impurity degrades the body, and it
affronts in an especial degree "the Holy Spirit which
we have from God." Therefore it stands first amongst
these "works of the flesh" in which it shows itself
hostile and repugnant to the Spirit of our Divine sonship.
"Joined to the harlot" in "one body," the vile
offender gives himself over in compact and communion
to the dominion of the flesh, as truly as he who is
"joined to the Lord" is "one spirit with Him"
(
On this subject it is difficult to speak faithfully and
yet directly. There are many happily in our sheltered
Christian homes who scarcely know of the existence of
this heathenish vice, except as it is named in Scripture.
To them it is an evil of the past, a nameless thing of
darkness. And it is well it should be so. Knowledge
of its horrors may be suitable for seasoned social reformers,
and necessary to the publicist who must understand Comp.,
Wherever, and in whatever form, the offence exists
which violates this relationship, Paul's fiery interdict
is ready to be launched upon it. The anger of Jesus
burned against this sin. In the wanton look He discerns
the crime of adultery, which in the Mosaic law
was punished with death by stoning. "The Lord is
an avenger in all these things"—in everything that
touches the honour of the human person and the sanctity
Uncleanness and lasciviousness are companions of the more specific impurity. The former is the general quality of this class of evils, and includes whatever is contaminating in word or look, in gesture or in dress, in thought or sentiment. "Lasciviousness" is uncleanness open and shameless. The filthy jest, the ogling glance, the debauched and sensual face, these tell their own tale; they speak of a soul that has rolled in corruption till respect for virtue has died out of it. In this direction "the works of the flesh" can go no further. A lascivious human creature is loathsomeness itself. To see it is like looking through a door into hell.
A leading critic of our own times has, under this
word of Paul's, put his finger upon the plague-spot in
the national life of our Gallic neighbours—Aselgeia, or
Wantonness. There may be a certain truth in this
charge. Their disposition in several respects resembles
that of Paul's Galatians. But we can scarcely afford to
reproach others on this score. English society is none
too clean. Home is for our people everywhere, thank
II. Next to lust in this procession of the Vices comes
idolatry. In Paganism they were associated by many
ties. Some of the most renowned and popular cults
of the day were open purveyors of sensuality and lent
to it the sanctions of religion. Idolatry is found here
in fit company (comp.
Idolatry forms the centre of the awful picture of Gentile
depravity drawn by our Apostle in his letter to Rome
(ch. i.). It is, as he there shows, the outcome of man's
native antipathy to the knowledge of God. Willingly
men "took lies in the place of truth, and served the
creature rather than the Creator." They merged God
in nature, debasing the spiritual conception of the
When at last under the Roman Empire the different Pagan races blended their customs and faiths, and "the Orontes flowed into the Tiber," there came about a perfect chaos of religions. Gods Greek and Roman, Phrygian, Syrian, Egyptian jostled each other in the great cities—a colluvies deorum more bewildering even than the colluvies gentium,—each cultus striving to outdo the rest in extravagance and licence. The system of classic Paganism was reduced to impotence. The false gods destroyed each other. The mixture of heathen religions, none of them pure, produced complete demoralisation.
The Jewish monotheism remained, the one rock of
human faith in the midst of this dissolution of the old
nature-creeds. Its conception of the Godhead was not
so much metaphysical as ethical. "Hear O Israel,"
says every Jew to his fellows, "the Lord our God is
one Lord." But that "one Lord" was also "the Holy
One of Israel." Let his holiness be sullied, let the
thought of the Divine ethical transcendence suffer
The idolatry and immorality of the Gentile world
had a common root. God's anger, the Apostle declared,
blazed forth equally against both (
"They did not like to retain God in their knowledge."
"They loved darkness rather than light, because their
Sorcery is the attendant of idolatry. A low, naturalistic conception of the Divine lends itself to immoral purposes. Men try to operate upon it by material causes, and to make it a partner in evil. Such is the origin of magic. Natural objects deemed to possess supernatural attributes, as the stars and the flight of birds, have divine omens ascribed to them. Drugs of occult power, and things grotesque or curious made mysterious by the fancy, are credited with influence over the Nature-gods. From the use of drugs in incantations and exorcisms the word pharmakeia, here denoting sorcery, took its meaning. The science of chemistry has destroyed a world of magic connected with the virtues of herbs. These superstitions formed a chief branch of sorcery and witchcraft, and have flourished under many forms of idolatry. And the magical arts were common instruments of malice. The sorcerer's charms were in requisition, as in the case of Balaam, to curse one's enemies, to weave some spell that should involve them in destruction. Accordingly sorcery finds its place there between idolatry and enmities.
III. On this latter head the Apostle enlarges with
edifying amplitude. Enmities, strife, jealousies, ragings,
factions, divisions, parties, envyings—what a list!
Eight out of fifteen of "the works of the flesh manifest"
to Paul in writing to Galatia belong to this one
category. The Celt all over the world is known for a
hot-tempered fellow. He has high capabilities; he is
generous, enthusiastic, and impressionable. Meanness
and treachery are foreign to his nature. But he is
irritable. And it is in a vain and irritable disposition
"Enmities" are private hatreds or family feuds, which break out openly in "strife." This is seen in Church affairs, when men take opposite sides not so much from any decided difference of judgement, as from personal dislike and the disposition to thwart an opponent. "Jealousies" and "wraths" (or "rages") are passions attending enmity and strife. There is jealousy where one's antagonist is a rival, whose success is felt as a wrong to oneself. This may be a silent passion, repressed by pride but consuming the mind inwardly. Rage is the open eruption of anger which, when powerless to inflict injury, will find vent in furious language and menacing gestures. There are natures in which these tempests of rage take a perfectly demonic form. The face grows livid, the limbs move convulsively, the nervous organism is seized by a storm of frenzy; and until it has passed, the man is literally beside himself. Such exhibitions are truly appalling. They are "works of the flesh" in which, yielding to its own ungoverned impulse, it gives itself up to be possessed by Satan and is "set on fire of hell."
Factions, divisions, parties are words synonymous.
"Divisions" is the more neutral term, and represents
Envyings (or grudges) complete this bitter series. This term might have found a place beside "enmities" and "strife." Standing where it does, it seems to denote the rankling anger, the persistent ill-will caused by party-feuds. The Galatian quarrels left behind them grudges and resentments which became inveterate. These "envyings," the fruit of old contentions, were in turn the seed of new strife. Settled rancour is the last and worst form of contentiousness. It is so much more culpable than "jealousy" or "rage," as it has not the excuse of personal conflict; and it does not subside, as the fiercest outburst of passion may, leaving room for forgiveness. It nurses its revenge, waiting, like Shylock, for the time when it shall "feed fat its ancient grudge."
"Where jealousy and faction are, there," says James,
"is confusion and every vile deed." This was the
state of things to which the Galatian societies were
tending. The Judaizers had sown the seeds of discord,
and it had fallen on congenial soil. Paul has already
invoked Christ's law of love to exorcise this spirit of
destruction (vv. 13-15). He tells the Galatians that
their vainglorious and provoking attitude towards each
IV. Finally, we come to sins of intemperance—drunkenness, revellings, and the like.
These are the vices of a barbarous people. Our
Teutonic and Celtic forefathers were alike prone to
this kind of excess. Peter warns the Galatians against
"wine-bibbings, revellings, carousings." The passion
for strong drink, along with "lasciviousness" and
"lusts" on the one hand, and "abominable idolatries"
on the other, had in Asia Minor swelled into a "cataclysm
of riot," overwhelming the Gentile world (
A strong and raw animal nature is in itself a temptation
to this vice. For men exposed to cold and hardship,
the intoxicating cup has a potent fascination. The
flesh, buffeted by the fatigues of a rough day's work,
finds a strange zest in its treacherous delights. The
man "drinks and forgets his poverty, and remembers
his misery no more." For the hour, while the spell
is upon him, he is a king; he lives under another sun;
the world's wealth is his. He wakes up to find himself
a sot! With racked head and unstrung frame he
returns to the toil and squalor of his life, adding new
There are others "given to much wine," for whom one feels less compassion. Their convivial indulgences are a part of their general habits of luxury and sensuality, an open, flagrant triumph of the flesh over the Spirit. These sinners require stern rebuke and warning. They must understand that "those who practise such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God," that "he who soweth to his own flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption." Of these and their like it was that Jesus said, "Woe unto you that laugh now; for ye shall mourn and weep."
Our British Churches at the present time are more alive to this than perhaps to any other social evil. They are setting themselves sternly against drunkenness, and none too soon. Of all the works of the flesh this has been, if not the most potent, certainly the most conspicuous in the havoc it has wrought amongst us. Its ruinous effects are "manifest" in every prison and asylum, and in the private history of innumerable families in every station of life. Who is there that has not lost a kinsman, a friend, or at least a neighbour or acquaintance, whose life was wrecked by this accursed passion? Much has been done, and is doing, to check its ravages. But more remains to be accomplished before civil law and public opinion shall furnish all the protection against this evil necessary for a people so tempted by climate and by constitution as our own.
With fornication at the beginning and drunkenness at the end, Paul's description of "the works of the flesh" is, alas! far indeed from being out of date. The dread procession of the Vices marches on before our eyes. Races and temperaments vary; science has transformed the visible aspect of life; but the ruling appetites of human nature are unchanged, its primitive vices are with us to-day. The complicated problems of modern life, the gigantic evils which confront our social reformers, are simply the primeval corruptions of mankind in a new guise—the old lust and greed and hate. Under his veneer of manners, the civilized European, untouched by the grace of the Holy Spirit of God, is still apt to be found a selfish, cunning, unchaste, revengeful, superstitious creature, distinguished from his barbarian progenitor chiefly by his better dress and more cultivated brain, and his inferior agility. Witness the great Napoleon, a very "god of this world," but in all that gives worth to character no better than a savage!
With Europe turned into one vast camp and its nations groaning audibly under the weight of their armaments, with hordes of degraded women infesting the streets of its cities, with discontent and social hatred smouldering throughout its industrial populations, we have small reason to boast of the triumphs of modern civilisation. Better circumstances do not make better men. James' old question has for our day a terrible pertinence: "Whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your pleasures that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and covet, and cannot obtain. Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may spend it on your pleasures."
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law."—Gal. v. 22, 23.
These verses contain the ideal of character furnished
by the gospel of Christ. Here is the religion of Jesus
put in practice. These are the sentiments and habits,
the views of duty, the temper of mind, which faith in
Jesus Christ tends to form. Paul's conception of the
ideal human life at once "commends itself to every
man's conscience." And he owed it to the gospel of
Christ. His ethics are the fruit of his dogmatic faith.
What other system of belief has produced a like result,
"Men do not gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles." Thoughts of this kind, lives of this kind, are not the product of imposture or delusion. The "works" of systems of error are "manifest" in the moral wrecks they leave behind them, strewing the track of history. But the virtues here enumerated are the fruits which the Spirit of Christ has brought forth, and brings forth at this day more abundantly than ever. As a theory of morals, a representation of what is best in conduct, Christian teaching has held for 1800 years an unrivalled place. Christ and His Apostles are still the masters of morality. Few have been bold enough to offer any improvements on the ethics of Jesus; and smaller still has been the acceptance which their proposals have obtained. The new idea of virtue which Christianity has given to the world, the energy it has imparted to the moral will, the immense and beneficial revolutions it has brought about in human society, supply a powerful argument for its divinity. Making every deduction for unfaithful Christians, who dishonour "the worthy name" they bear, still "the fruit of the Spirit" gathered in these eighteen centuries is a glorious witness to the virtue of the tree of life from which it grew.
This picture of the Christian life takes its place side
by side with others found in Paul's Epistles. It recalls
the figure of Charity in
It is interesting to compare the Apostle's definitions with Plato's celebrated scheme of the four cardinal virtues. They are wisdom, courage, temperance, with righteousness as the union and co-ordination of the other three. The difference between the cast of the Platonic and Pauline ethics is most instructive. In the Apostle's catalogue the first two of the philosophical virtues are wanting; unless "courage" be included, as it properly may, under the name of "virtue" in the Philippian list. With the Greek thinker, wisdom is the fundamental excellence of the soul. Knowledge is in his view the supreme desideratum, the guarantee for moral health and social well-being. The philosopher is the perfect man, the proper ruler of the commonwealth. Intellectual culture brings in its train ethical improvement. For "no man is knowingly vicious:" such was the dictum of Socrates, the father of Philosophy. In the ethics of the gospel, love becomes the chief of virtues, parent of the rest.
Love and humility are the two features whose
predominance distinguishes the Christian from the
purest classical conceptions of moral worth. The
If love was wanting in natural ethics, humility was
positively excluded. The pride of philosophy regarded
it as a vice rather than a virtue. "Lowliness" is
ranked with "pettiness" and "repining" and "despondency"
as the product of "littleness of soul."
On the contrary, the man of lofty soul is held up
to admiration, who is "worthy of great things and
deems himself so,"—who is "not given to wonder, for
nothing seems great to him,"—who is "ashamed to
receive benefits," and "has the appearance indeed of
being supercilious" (Aristotle). How far removed is
this model from our Example who has said, "Learn of
Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart." The classical
idea of virtue is based on the greatness of man; the
Christian, on the goodness of God. Before the Divine
glory in Jesus Christ the soul of the believer bows
in adoration. It is humbled at the throne of grace,
chastened into self-forgetting. It gazes on this Image
Nine virtues are woven together in this golden chain of the Holy Spirit's fruit. They fall into three groups of three, four, and two respectively—according as they refer primarily to God, love, joy, peace; to one's fellow-men, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faith; and to oneself, meekness, temperance. But the successive qualities are so closely linked and pass into one another with so little distance, that it is undesirable to emphasize the analysis; and while bearing the above distinctions in mind, we shall seek to give to each of the nine graces its separate place in the catalogue.
1. The fruit of the Spirit is love. That fitliest first.
Love is the Alpha and Omega of the Apostle's thoughts
concerning the new life in Christ. This queen of
graces is already enthroned within this chapter. In
ver. 6 Love came forward to be the minister of Faith;
in ver. 14 it reappeared as the ruling principle of Divine
law. These two offices of love are united here, where
it becomes the prime fruit of the Holy Spirit of God,
to whom the heart is opened by the act of faith, and
who enables us to keep God's law. Love is "the
fulfilling of the law;" for it is the essence of the
gospel; it is the spirit of sonship; without this Divine
affection, no profession of faith, no practice of good
works has any value in the sight of God or intrinsic
moral worth. Though I have all other gifts and merits—wanting
this, "I am nothing" (
This love is, in the first instance and above all, love
to God. It springs from the knowledge of His love to
man. "God is love," and "love is of God" (
In Paul's teaching, love forms the antithesis to knowledge.
By this opposition the wisdom of God is distinguished
from "the wisdom of this world and of its
princes, which come to nought" (
Loveless knowledge is not wisdom. For wisdom is lowly in her own eyes, mild and gracious. What the man of cold intellect sees, he sees clearly; he reasons on it well. But his data are defective. He discerns but the half, the poorer half of life. There is a whole heaven of facts of which he takes no account. He has an acute and sensitive perception of phenomena coming within the range of his five senses, and of everything that logic can elicit from such phenomena. But he "cannot see afar off." Above all, "he that loveth not, knoweth not God." He leaves out the Supreme Factor in human life; and all his calculations are vitiated. "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?"
If knowledge then is the enlightened eye, love is the throbbing, living heart of Christian goodness.
2. The fruit of the Spirit is joy. Joy dwells in the house of Love; nor elsewhere will she tarry.
Love is the mistress both of joy and sorrow.
Wronged, frustrated, hers is the bitterest of griefs.
Love makes us capable of pain and shame; but equally
of triumph and delight. Therefore the Lover of mankind
was the "Man of sorrows," whose love bared its
breast to the arrows of scorn and hate; and yet "for
the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross,
despising the shame." There was no sorrow like that
of Christ rejected and crucified; no joy like the joy of
Christ risen and reigning. This joy, the delight of
love satisfied in those it loves, is that whose fulfilment
He has promised to His disciples (
Such joy the selfish heart never knows. Life's choicest blessings, heaven's highest favours fail to bring it happiness. Sensuous gratification, and even intellectual pleasure by itself wants the true note of gladness. There is nothing that thrills the whole nature, that stirs the pulses of life and sets them dancing, like the touch of a pure love. It is the pearl of great price, for which "if a man would give all the substance of his house, he would be utterly contemned." But of all the joys love gives to life, that is the deepest which is ours when "the love of God is shed abroad in our heart." Then the full tide of blessedness pours into the human spirit. Then we know of what happiness our nature was made capable, when we know the love that God hath toward us.
This joy in the Lord quickens and elevates, while it cleanses, all other emotions. It raises the whole temperature of the heart. It gives a new glow to life. It lends a warmer and a purer tone to our natural affections. It sheds a diviner meaning, a brighter aspect over the common face of earth and sky. It throws a radiance of hope upon the toils and weariness of mortality. It "glories in tribulation." It triumphs in death. He who "lives in the Spirit" cannot be a dull, or peevish, or melancholy man. One with Christ his heavenly Lord, he begins already to taste His joy,—a joy which none taketh away and which many sorrows cannot quench.
Joy is the beaming countenance, the elastic step, the singing voice of Christian goodness.
3. But joy is a thing of seasons. It has its ebb and
flow, and would not be itself if it were constant. It
is crossed, varied, shadowed unceasingly. On earth
There is nothing fitful or febrile in the quality of
Peace. It is a settled quiet of the heart, a deep,
brooding mystery that "passeth all understanding,"
the stillness of eternity entering the spirit, the Sabbath
of God (
After the war of the passions, after the tempests of doubt and fear, Christ has spoken, "Peace, be still!" A great calm spreads over the troubled waters; wind and wave lie down hushed at His feet. The demonic powers that lashed the soul into tumult, vanish before His holy presence. The Spirit of Jesus takes possession of mind and heart and will. And His fruit is peace—always peace. This one virtue takes the place of the manifold forms of contention which make life a chaos and a misery. While He rules, "the peace of God guards the heart and thoughts" and holds them safe from inward mutiny or outward assault; and the dissolute, turbulent train of the works of the flesh find the gates of the soul barred against them.
Peace is the calm, unruffled brow, the poised and even temper which Christian goodness wears.
4. The heart at peace with God has patience with
men. "Charity suffereth long." She is not provoked
by opposition; nor soured by injustice; no, nor crushed
by men's contempt. She can afford to wait; for truth
and love will conquer in the end. She knows in whose
hand her cause is, and remembers how long He has
suffered the unbelief and rebellion of an insensate
world; she "considers Him that endured such contradiction
of sinners against Himself." Mercy and longsuffering
are qualities that we share with God Himself,
in which God was, and is, "manifest in the flesh." In
this ripe fruit of the Spirit there are joined "the love
of God, and the patience of Christ" (
Longsuffering is the patient magnanimity of Christian
goodness, the broad shoulders on which it "beareth
all things" (
5. "Charity suffereth long and is kind."
Gentleness (or kindness, as the word is more frequently and better rendered,) resembles "longsuffering" in finding its chief objects in the evil and unthankful. But while the latter is passive and self-contained, kindness is an active, busy virtue. She is moreover of a humble and tender spirit, stooping to the lowest need, thinking nothing too small in which she may help, ready to give back blessing for cursing, benefit for harm and wrong.
Kindness is the thoughtful insight, the delicate tact, the gentle ministering hand of Charity.
6. Linked with kindness comes goodness, which is its
other self, differing from it only as twin sisters may,
each fairer for the beauty of the other. Goodness
is perhaps more affluent, more catholic in its bounty;
Goodness is the honest, generous face, the open hand of Charity.
7. This procession of the Virtues has conducted us, in the order of Divine grace, from the thought of a loving, forgiving God, the Object of our love, our joy and peace, to that of an evil-doing, unhappy world, with its need of longsuffering and kindness; and we now come to the inner, sacred circle of brethren beloved in Christ, where, with goodness, faith—that is, trustfulness, confidence—is called into exercise.
The Authorised rendering "faith" seems to us in
this instance preferable to the "faithfulness" of the
Revisers. "Possibly," says Bishop Lightfoot:, "πίστις
may here signify 'trustfulness, reliance,' in one's
dealings with others; comp.
The faith that unites man to God, in turn joins man
to his fellows. Faith in the Divine Fatherhood becomes
trust in the human brotherhood. In this generous
attribute the Galatians were sadly deficient. "Honour
all men," wrote Peter to them; "love the brotherhood"
(
The true heart knows how to trust. He who doubts every one is even more deceived than the man who blindly confides in every one. There is no more miserable vice than cynicism; no man more ill-conditioned than he who counts all the world knaves or fools except himself. This poison of mistrust, this biting acid of scepticism is a fruit of irreligion. It is one of the surest signs of social and national decay.
The Christian man knows not only how to stand alone and to "bear all things," but also how to lean on others, strengthening himself by their strength and supporting them in weakness. He delights to "think others better" than himself; and here "meekness" is one with "faith." His own goodness gives him an eye for everything that is best in those around him.
Trustfulness is the warm, firm clasp of friendship, the generous and loyal homage which goodness ever pays to goodness.
8. Meekness, as we have seen, is the other side of faith. It is not tameness and want of spirit, as those who "judge after the flesh" are apt to think. Nor is meekness the mere quietness of a retiring disposition. "The man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth." It comports with the highest courage and activity; and is a qualification for public leadership. Jesus Christ stands before us as the perfect pattern of meekness. "I intreat you," pleads the Apostle with the self-asserting Corinthians, "by the meekness and gentleness of Christ!" Meekness is self-repression in view of the claims and needs of others; it is the "charity" which "seeketh not her own, looketh not to her own things, but to the things of others." For her, self is of no account in comparison with Christ and His kingdom, and the honour of His brethren.
Meekness is the content and quiet mien, the willing self-effacement that is the mark of Christlike goodness.
9. Finally temperance, or self-control,—third of Plato's cardinal virtues.
By this last link the chain of the virtues, at its higher end attached to the throne of the Divine love and mercy, is fastened firmly down into the actualities of daily habit and bodily regimen. Temperance, to change the figure, closes the array of the graces, holding the post of the rear-guard which checks all straggling and protects the march from surprise and treacherous overthrow.
If meekness is the virtue of the whole man as he
stands before his God and in the midst of his fellows,
temperance is that of his body, the tenement and instrument
of the regenerate spirit. It is the antithesis of
"drunkenness and revellings," which closed the list of
This also is a "fruit of the Spirit"—though we may count it the lowest and least, yet as indispensable to our salvation as the love of God itself. For the lack of this safeguard how many a saint has stumbled into folly and shame! It is no small thing for the Holy Spirit to accomplish in us, no mean prize for which we strive in seeking the crown of a perfect self-control. This mastery over the flesh is in truth the rightful prerogative of the human spirit, the dignity from which it fell through sin, and which the gift of the Spirit of Christ restores.
And this virtue in a Christian man is exercised for
the behoof of others, as well as for his own. "I keep
my body under," cries the Apostle, "I make it my
slave and not my master; lest, having preached to
Temperance is the guarded step, the sober, measured walk in which Christian goodness keeps the way of life, and makes straight paths for stumbling and straying feet.
"Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye which are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of meekness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. For if a man thinketh himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself. But let each man prove his own work, and then shall he have his glorying in regard of himself alone, and not of his neighbour. For each man shall bear his own burden."—Gal. vi. 1-5.
The Galatic temperament, as we have seen, was
prone to the mischievous vanity which the Apostle
here reproves. Those who had, or fancied they had,
some superiority over others in talent or in character,
prided themselves upon it. Even spiritual gifts were
made matter of ostentation; and display on the part
There are two reflections which should instantly correct the spirit of vain-glory. The Apostle appeals in the first place to brotherly love, to the claims that an erring fellow-Christian has upon our sympathy, to the meekness and forbearance which the Spirit of grace inspires, in fine to Christ's law which makes compassion our duty. At the same time he points out to us our own infirmity and exposure to temptation. He reminds us of the weight of our individual responsibility and the final account awaiting us. A proper sense at once of the rights of others and of our own obligations will make this shallow vanity impossible.
This double-edged exhortation takes shape in two
I. What then are the considerations that commend the burdens of others for our bearing?
The burden the Apostle has in view is that of a brother's trespass: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in some trespass."
Here the question arises as to whether Paul means
overtaken by the temptation, or by the discovery of his
sin—surprised into committing, or in committing the
trespass. Winer, Lightfoot, and some other interpreters,
read the words in the latter sense: "surprised,
detected in the act of committing any sin, so that his
guilt is placed beyond a doubt" (Lightfoot). We are
persuaded, notwithstanding, that the common view of
the text is the correct one. The manner of the
offender's detection has little to do with the way in
which he should be treated; but the circumstances of
his fall have everything to do with it. The suddenness,
the surprise of his temptation is both a reason
for more lenient judgment, and a ground for hope of
his restoration. The preposition "in" (έν), it is
urged, stands in the way of this interpretation. We
might have expected to read "(surprised) by," or
perhaps "into (any sin)." But the word is "trespass,"
not "sin." It points not to the cause of the man's
fall, but to the condition in which it has placed him.
The Greek preposition (according to a well known
idiom of verbs of motion) For this pregnant force of έν see the grammarians: Moulton's
Winer, pp. 514, 5; A. Buttmann, pp. 328, 9. (Eng. Ver.).
The Apostle is supposing an instance—possibly an
actual case—in which the sin committed was due to
weakness and surprise, rather than deliberate intention;
like that of Eve, when "the woman being
beguiled fell into transgression."
Such an effect the occurrence should have upon "the
spiritual," on the men of love and peace, who "walk
in the Spirit." The Apostle's appeal is qualified by
this definition. Vain and self-seeking men, the
irritable, the resentful, are otherwise affected by a
neighbour's trespass. They will be angry with him,
lavish in virtuous scorn; but it is not in them to
"restore such a one." They are more likely to aggravate
than heal the wound, to push the weak man down
when he tries to rise, than to help him to his feet.
The restoration here signified, denotes not only, or
not so much, the man's inward, spiritual renewal, as
his recovery for the Church, the mending of the rent
caused by his removal. In
Of all the fruits of the Spirit, meekness is most
required for this office of restoration, the meekness
of Christ the Good Shepherd—of Paul who was
"gentle as a nurse" amongst his children, and even
against the worst offenders preferred to "come in love
and a spirit of meekness," rather than "with a rod"
(
Meekness becomes sinful men dealing with fellow-sinners.
"Considering thyself," says the Apostle,
"lest thou also be tempted." It is a noticeable thing
that men morally weak in any given direction are apt
to be the severest judges of those who err in the same
respect, just as people who have risen out of poverty
are often the harshest towards the poor. They wish
to forget their own past, and hate to be reminded of a
condition from which they have suffered. Or is the
judge, in sentencing a kindred offender, seeking to reinforce
his own conscience and to give a warning to
himself? One is inclined sometimes to think so. But
reflection on our own infirmities should counteract,
instead of fostering censoriousness. Every man knows
enough of himself to make him chary of denouncing
others. "Look to thyself," cries the Apostle. "Thou
hast considered thy brother's faults. Now turn thine
eye inward, and contemplate thine own. Hast thou
never aforetime committed the offence with which he
stands charged; or haply yielded to the like temptation
in a less degree? Or if not even that, it may be
thou art guilty of sins of another kind, though hidden
from human sight, in the eyes of God no less heinous."
"Judge not," said the Judge of all the earth, "lest ye
be judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured unto you" (
This exhortation begins in general terms; but in the
latter clause of ver. 1 it passes into the individualising
singular—"looking to thyself, lest even thou be tempted."
The disaster befalling one reveals the common peril;
The burden of a brother's trespass is the most painful that can devolve upon a Christian man. But this is not the only burden we bring upon each other. There are burdens of anxiety and sorrow, of personal infirmity, of family difficulty, of business embarrassment, infinite varieties and complications of trial in which the resources of brotherly sympathy are taxed. The injunction of the Apostle has an unlimited range. That which burdens my friend and brother cannot be otherwise than a solicitude to me. Whatever it be that cripples him and hinders his running the race set before him, I am bound, according to the best of my judgement and ability, to assist him to overcome it. If I leave him to stagger on alone, to sink under his load when my shoulder might have eased it for him, the reproach will be mine.
This is no work of supererogation, no matter of
mere liking and choice. I am not at liberty to
refuse to share the burdens of the brotherhood.
"Bear ye one another's burdens," Paul says, "and so
fulfil the law of Christ." This law the Apostle has
already cited and enforced against the contentions and
jealousies rife in Galatia (ch. v. 14, 15). But it has a
further application. Christ's law of love not only says,
This law makes of the Church one body, with a
solidarity of interests and obligations. It finds employment
and discipline for the energy of Christian freedom,
in yoking it to the service of the over-burdened. It
reveals the dignity and privilege of moral strength,
which consist not in the enjoyment of its own superiority,
but in its power to bear "the infirmities of the
weak." This was the glory of Christ, who "pleased
not Himself" (
Only this law must not be abused by the indolent and the overreaching, by the men who are ready to throw their burdens on others and make every generous neighbour the victim of their dishonesty. It is the need not the demand of our brother which claims our help. We are bound to take care that it is his necessity to which we minister, not his imposture or his slothfulness. The warning that "each man shall bear his own burden" is addressed to those who receive, as well as to those who render aid in the common burden-bearing of the Church.
II. The adjustment of social and individual duty is
often far from easy, and requires the nicest discernment
Ver. 3 stands between the two counterpoised estimates. It is another shaft directed against Galatian vain-glory, and pointed with Paul's keenest irony. "For if a man thinketh he is something, being nothing he deceiveth himself."
This truth is very evident. But what is its bearing
on the matter in hand? The maxim is advanced to
support the foregoing admonition. It was their self-conceit
that led some of the Apostle's readers to treat
with contempt the brother who had trespassed; he tells
them that this opinion of theirs is a delusion, a kind of
mental hallucination (φρεναπατᾷ
ἑαυτόν). It betrays
a melancholy ignorance. The "spiritual" man who
"thinks himself to be something," says to you, "I am
quite above these weak brethren, as you see. Their
habits of life, their temptations are not mine. Their sympathy
would be useless to me. And I shall not burden
myself with their feebleness, nor vex myself with their
ignorance and rudeness." If any man separates himself
from the Christian commonalty and breaks the ties of
religious fellowship on grounds of this sort, and yet
imagines he is following Christ, he "deceives himself."
Others will see how little his affected eminence is worth.
The fact of a man's "thinking himself to be something" goes far to prove that he "is nothing." "Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight." Real knowledge is humble; it knows its nothingness. Socrates, when the oracle pronounced him the wisest man in Greece, at last discovered that the response was right, inasmuch as he alone was aware that he knew nothing, while other men were confident of their knowledge. And a greater than Socrates, our All-wise, All-holy Saviour, says to us, "Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart." It is in humility and dependence, in self-forgetting that true wisdom begins. Who are we, although the most refined or highest in place, that we should despise plain, uncultured members of the Church, those who bear life's heavier burdens and amongst whom our Saviour spent His days on earth, and treat them as unfit for our company, unworthy of fellowship with us in Christ?
They are themselves the greatest losers who neglect
to fulfil Christ's law. Such men might learn from their
humbler brethren, accustomed to the trials and temptations
of a working life and a rough world, how to bear
more worthily their own burdens. How foolish of
"the eye to say to the hand" or "foot, I have no need
of thee!" "God hath chosen the poor of this world
rich in faith." There are truths of which they are our
best teachers—priceless lessons of the power of Divine
grace and the deep things of Christian experience.
This isolation robs the poorer members of the Church
in their turn of the manifold help due to them from
communion with those more happily circumstanced.
How many of the evils around us would be ameliorated,
The vain conceit of their superiority indulged in by some of his readers, the Apostle further corrects by reminding the self-deceivers of their own responsibility. The irony of ver. 3 passes into a sterner tone of warning in vv. 4 and 5. "Let each man try his own work," he cries. "Judge yourselves, instead of judging one another. Mind your own duty, rather than your neighbours' faults. Do not think of your worth or talents in comparison with theirs; but see to it that your work is right." The question for each of us is not, What do others fail to do? but, What am I myself really doing? What will my life's work amount to, when measured by that which God expects from me?
This question shuts each man up within his own
conscience. It anticipates the final judgement-day.
"Every one of us must give account of himself to God"
(
"And then"—if our work abide the test—"we shall
have our glorying in ourselves alone, not in regard to
our neighbour." Not his flaws and failures, but my own
honest work will be the ground of my satisfaction.
This was Paul's "glorying" in face of the slanders
by which he was incessantly pursued. It lay in the
testimony of his conscience. He lived under the
severest self-scrutiny. He knew himself as the man
only can who "knows the fear of the Lord," who
places himself every day before the dread tribunal of
Christ Jesus. He is "made manifest unto God;" and
in the light of that searching Presence he can affirm
that he "knows nothing against himself."
So that this boast of the Apostle, in which he
invites the vainglorious Galatians to secure a share,
resolves itself after all into his one boast, "in the cross
of our Lord Jesus Christ" (ver. 14). If his work on
trial should prove to be gold, "abiding" amongst the
world's imperishable treasures and fixed foundations
of truth (
"For each will bear his own load." Here is the ultimate reason for the self-examination to which the Apostle has been urging his readers, in order to restrain their vanity. The emphatic repetition of the words each man in vv. 4 and 5 brings out impressively the personal character of the account to be rendered. At the same time, the deeper sense of our own burdens thus awakened will help to stir in us sympathy for the loads under which our fellows labour. So that this warning indirectly furthers the appeal for sympathy with which the chapter began.
Faithful scrutiny of our work may give us reasons
for satisfaction and gratitude towards God. But it
will yield matter of another kind. It will call to
remembrance old sins and follies, lost opportunities,
wasted powers, with their burden of regret and humiliation.
It will set before us the array of our obligations,
the manifold tasks committed to us by our heavenly
Master, compelling us to say, "Who is sufficient for
these things?" And beside the reproofs of the past and
the stern demands of the present, there sounds in the
soul's ear the message of the future, the summons to
In this sentence the Apostle employs a different
word from that used in ver. 2. There he was thinking
of the weight, the burdensomeness of our brother's
troubles, which we haply may lighten for him, and
which is so far common property. But the second
word, φορτίον (applied for instance to a ship's lading),
indicates that which is proper to each in the burdens
of life. There are duties that we have no power to
devolve, cares and griefs that we must bear in secret,
problems that we must work out severally and for
ourselves. To consider them aright, to weigh well the
sum of our duty will dash our self-complacency; it will
surely make us serious and humble. Let us wake
up from dreams of self-pleasing to an earnest, manly
apprehension of life's demands—"while," like the
Apostle, "we look not at the things which are seen,
but at the things which are not seen and eternal"
(
After all, it is the men who have the highest standard
for themselves that as a rule are most considerate in
In the Christian conscience the sense of personal and that of social responsibility serve each to stimulate and guard the other. Duty and sympathy, love and law are fused into one. For Christ is all in all; and these two hemispheres of life unite in Him.
"But let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things. Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. So then, as we have opportunity, let us work that which is good toward all men, and especially toward them that are of the household of the faith"—Gal. vi. 6-10.
From this point of view ver. 6 gains a very comprehensive
sense. "All good things" cannot surely
be limited to the "carnal things" of
But it is spiritual fellowship that the Apostle chiefly
desiderates. The true minister of Christ counts this
vastly more sacred, and has this interest far more at
heart than his own temporalities. He labours for the
unity of the Church; he strives to secure the mutual
sympathy and co-operation of all orders and ranks—
teachers and taught, officers and private members—"in
every good word and work." He must have the heart
of his people with him in his work, or his joy will be
Such communion the Apostle craves from his children
in the faith with an intense yearning. This is the one
fruit of God's grace in them which he covets to reap
for himself, and feels he has a right to expect. "Be
ye as I am," he cries—"do not desert me, my children,
for whom I travail in birth. Let me not have to toil
for you in vain" (ch. iv. 12-19). So again, writing to
the Corinthians: "It was I that begat you in Christ
Jesus; I beseech you then, be followers of me. Let me
remind you of my ways in the Lord.... O ye Corinthians,
In ver. 10 he extends his appeal to embrace in it all the kindly offices of life. For the love inspired by the Church, the service rendered to her, should quicken all our human sympathies and make us readier to meet every claim of pity or affection. While our sympathies, like those of a loving family, will be concerned "especially" with "the household of faith," and within that circle more especially with our pastors and teachers in Christ, they have no limit but that of "opportunity;" they should "work that which is good toward all men." True zeal for the Church widens instead of narrowing, our charities. Household affection is the nursery, not the rival, of love to our fatherland and to humanity.
Now the Apostle is extremely urgent in this matter
of communion between teachers and taught. It concerns
the very life of the Christian community. The
welfare of the Church and the progress of the kingdom
of God depend on the degree to which its individual
members accept their responsibility in its affairs. Ill-will
towards Christian teachers is paralyzing in its
effects on the Church's life. Greatly are they to blame,
if their conduct gives rise to discontent. Only less
severe is the condemnation of those in lower place who
harbour in themselves and foster in the minds of others
sentiments of disloyalty. To cherish this mistrust, to
Now, the Apostle says, God is not to be defrauded
in this way. Men may wrong each other; they may
grieve and affront His ministers. But no man is clever
enough to cheat God. It is not Him, it is themselves
they will prove to have deceived. Vain and selfish
men who take the best that God and man can do for
them as though it were a tribute to their greatness,
envious and restless men who break the Church's
fellowship of peace, will reap at last even as they sow.
The mischief and the loss may fall on others now; but
Thus the Apostle, in vv. 6 and 7, places this matter in the searching light of eternity. He brings to bear upon it one of the great spiritual maxims characteristic of his teaching. Paul's unique influence as a religious teacher lies in his mastery of principles of this kind, in the keenness of insight and the incomparable vigour with which he applies eternal truths to commonplace occurrences. The paltriness and vulgarity of these local broils and disaffections lend to his warning a more severe impressiveness. With what a startling and sobering force, one thinks, the rebuke of these verses must have fallen on the ears of the wrangling Galatians! How unspeakably mean their quarrels appear in the light of the solemn issues opening out before them! It was God whom their folly had presumed to mock. It was the harvest of eternal life of which their factiousness threatened to defraud them.
The principle on which this warning rests is stated
in terms that give it universal application: Whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap. This is
in fact the postulate of all moral responsibility. It
asserts the continuity of personal existence, the connection
of cause and effect in human character. It makes
man the master of his own destiny. It declares that
his future doom hangs upon his present choice, and is
in truth its evolution and consummation. The twofold
lot of "corruption" or "life eternal" is in every case
no more, and no less, than the proper harvest of the
kind of sowing practised here and now. The use made
This great axiom deserves to be looked at in its broadest aspect. It involves the following considerations:—
I. Our present life is the seed-time of an eternal harvest.
Each recurring year presents a mirror of human existence. The analogy is a commonplace of the world's poetry. The spring is in every land a picture of youth—its morning freshness and innocence, its laughing sunshine, its opening blossoms, its bright and buoyant energy; and, alas, oftentimes its cold winds and nipping frosts and early, sudden blight! Summer images a vigorous manhood, with all the powers in action and the pulses of life beating at full swing; when the dreams of youth are worked out in sober, waking earnest; when manly strength is tested and matured under the heat of mid-day toil, and character is disciplined, and success or failure in life's battle must be determined. Then follows mellow autumn, season of shortening days and slackening steps and gathering snows; season too of ripe experience, of chastened thought and feeling, of widened influence and clustering honours. And the story ends in the silence and winter of the grave! Ends? Nay, that is a new beginning! This whole round of earthly vicissitude is but a single spring-time. It is the mere childhood of man's existence, the threshold of the vast house of life.
The oldest and wisest man amongst us is only a
little child in the reckoning of eternity. The Apostle
Paul counted himself no more. "We know in part,"
he says; "we prophesy in part—talking, reasoning
Think of that, struggling heart, worn with labour,
broken by sorrow, cramped and thwarted by the pressure
of an unkindly world. "The earnest expectancy
of the creation" waits for your revealing (
II. In the second place, the quality of the future harvest depends entirely on the present sowing.
In quantity, as we have seen, in outward state and
circumstance, there is a complete contrast. The
harvest surpasses the seed from which it sprang, by
thirty, sixty or a hundred-fold. But in quality we find
a strict agreement. In degree they may differ infinitely;
in kind they are one. The harvest multiplies
the effect of the sower's labour; but it multiplies
exactly that effect, and nothing else. This law runs
through all life. If we could not count upon it, labour
would be purposeless and useless; we should have to
yield ourselves passively to nature's caprice. The
farmer sows wheat in his cornfield, the gardener plants
and trains his fig-tree; and he gets wheat, or figs, for
his reward—nothing else. Or is he a "sluggard"
that "will not plow by reason of the cold?" Does he
let weeds and thistledown have the run of his garden-plot?
Then it yields him a plentiful harvest of thistles
and of weeds! What could he expect? "Men do not
All this has its moral counterpart. The law of reproduction in kind holds equally true of the relation of this life to the next. Eternity for us will be the multiplied, consummated outcome of the good or evil of the present life. Hell is just sin ripe—rotten ripe. Heaven is the fruitage of righteousness. There will be two kinds of reaping, the Apostle tells us, because there are two different kinds of sowing. "He that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption:" there is nothing arbitrary or surprising in that. "Corruption"—the moral decay and dissolution of the man's being—is the natural retributive effect of his carnality. And "he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." Here, too, the sequence is inevitable. Like breeds its like. Life springs of life; and death eternal is the culmination of the soul's present death to God and goodness. The future glory of the saints is at once a Divine reward, and a necessary development of their present faithfulness. And eternal life lies germinally contained in faith's earliest beginning, when it is but as "a grain of mustard seed." We may expect in our final state the outcome of our present conduct, as certainly as the farmer who puts wheat into his furrows in November will count on getting wheat out of them again next August.
Under this law of the harvest we are living at this
moment, and sowing every day the seed of an immortality
of honour or of shame. Life is the seed-plot of
Who is "he that soweth to his own flesh?" It is,
in a word, the selfish man. He makes his personal
interest, and as a rule his bodily pleasure, directly or
ultimately, the object of life. The sense of responsibility
This is the "minding of the flesh" which "is death"
(
III. And finally, God Himself is the Lord of the moral harvest. The rule of retribution, the nexus that binds together our sowing and our reaping, is not something automatic and that comes about of itself; it is directed by the will of God, who "worketh all in all."
Even in the natural harvest we look upwards to Him.
The order and regularity of nature, the fair procession
of the seasons waiting on the silent and majestic march
of the heavens, have in all ages directed thinking and
grateful men to the Supreme Giver, to the creative Mind
and sustaining Will that sits above the worlds. As
Paul reminded the untutored Lycaonians, "He hath
not left Himself without witness, in that He gave us
rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts
with food and gladness." It is "God" that "gives
the increase" of the husbandman's toil, of the merchant's
forethought, of the artist's genius and skill. We do
not sing our harvest songs, with our Pagan forefathers,
to sun and rain and west wind, to mother Earth and
the mystic powers of Nature. In these poetic idolatries
were yet blended higher thoughts and a sense of Divine
beneficence. But "to us there is one God, the Father,
of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord,
Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we
through Him." In the harvest of the earth man is a
worker together with God. The farmer does his part,
fulfilling the conditions God has laid down in nature;
"he putteth in the wheat in rows, and the barley in its
appointed place; for his God doth instruct him aright,
and doth teach him." He tills the ground, he sows
the seed—and there he leaves it to God. "He sleeps
and rises night and day; and the seed springs and
grows up, he knows not how." And the wisest man of
science cannot tell him how. "God giveth it a body,
as it hath pleased Him." But how—that is His own
secret, which He seems likely to keep. All life in its
growth, as in its inception, is a mystery, hid with Christ
in God. Every seed sown in field or garden is a deposit
committed to the faithfulness of God; which He honours
In the moral world this Divine co-operation is the more immediate, as the field of action lies nearer, if one may so say, to the nature of God Himself. The earthly harvest may, and does often fail. Storms waste it; blights canker it; drought withers, or fire consumes it. Industry and skill, spent in years of patient labour, are doomed not unfrequently to see their reward snatched from them. The very abundance of other lands deprives our produce of its value. The natural creation "was made subject to vanity." Its frustration and disappointment are over-ruled for higher ends. But in the spiritual sphere there are no casualties, no room for accident or failure. Here life comes directly into contact with the Living God, its fountain; and its laws partake of His absoluteness.
Each act of faith, of worship, of duty and integrity,
is a compact between the soul and God. We "commit
our souls in well-doing unto a faithful Creator"
(
"See with how large letters I write unto you with mine own hand. As many as desire to make a fair show in the flesh, they compel you to be circumcised; only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For not even they who receive circumcision do themselves keep the law; but they desire to have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh. But far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world."—Gal. vi. 11-14.
Paul draws attention at this point to his penmanship,
to the size of the letters he is using and their autographic
form. "See," he says, "I write this in large
characters, and under my own hand." But does this
remark apply to the whole Epistle, or to its concluding
paragraph from this verse onwards? To the latter
only, as we think. The word "look" is a kind of nota
bene. It marks something new, designed by its form
and appearance in the manuscript to arrest the eye. See
The past tense of the verb (literally, I have written: ἔγραψα) is in accordance with Greek epistolary idiom. The writer associates himself with his readers. When the letter comes to them, Paul has written what they now peruse. On the assumption that the whole Epistle is autographic it is hard to see what object the large characters would serve, or why they should be referred to just at this point.
Ver. 11 is in fact a sensational heading. The last paragraph of the Epistle is penned in larger type and in the Apostle's characteristic hand, in order to fasten the attention of these impressionable Galatians upon his final deliverance. This device Paul employs but once. It is a kind of practice easily vulgarised and that loses its force by repetition, as in the case of "loud" printing and declamatory speech.
In this emphatic finalé the interest of the Epistle, so
powerfully sustained and carried through so many
stages, is raised to a yet higher pitch. Its pregnant
I. The glorying of the Apostle's adversaries. "They would have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh" (ver. 12).
This is the climax of his reproach against them. It gives us the key to their character. The boast measures the man. The aim of the Legalists was to get so many Gentiles circumcised, to win proselytes through Christianity to Judaism. Every Christian brother persuaded to submit himself to this rite was another trophy for them. His circumcision, apart from any moral or spiritual considerations involved in the matter, was of itself enough to fill these proselytizers with joy. They counted up their "cases;" they rivalled each other in the competition for Jewish favour on this ground. To "glory in your flesh—to be able to point to your bodily condition as the proof of their influence and their devotion to the Law—this," Paul says, "is the object for which they ply you with so many flatteries and sophistries."
Their aim was intrinsically low and unworthy.
They "want to make a fair show (to present a good
face) in the flesh." Flesh in this place (ver. 12) recalls
the contrast between Flesh and Spirit expounded in the
This was a worldly, and in their case a cowardly
policy. "They constrain you to be circumcised, only
that for the cross of Christ they may not suffer persecution"
(ver. 12). This they were determined by
all means to avoid. Christ had sent His servants
forth "as sheep in the midst of wolves." The man
that would serve Him, He said, must "follow Him,
taking up his cross." But the Judaists thought they
The cross of Christ, as the Apostle has repeatedly
declared (comp. Chapters XII and XXI), carried with
it in Jewish eyes a flagrant reproach; and its acceptance
placed a gulf between the Christian and the
orthodox Jew. The depth of that gulf became increasingly
apparent the more widely the gospel spread,
and the more radically its principles came to be applied.
To Paul it was now sorrowfully evident that
the Jewish nation had rejected Christianity. They
would not hear the Apostles of Jesus any more than
the Master. For the preaching of the cross they had
only loathing and contempt. Judaism recognised in
the Church of the Crucified its most dangerous enemy,
and was opening the fire of persecution against it all
along the line. In this state of affairs, for the party of
men to compromise and make private terms for themselves
with the enemies of Christ was treachery.
They were surrendering, as this Epistle shows, all that
Not that they cared so much for the law in itself.
Their glorying was insincere, as well as selfish: "For
neither do the circumcised themselves keep the law.—These
men who profess such enthusiasm for the law
of Moses and insist so zealously on your submission to
it, dishonour it by their own behaviour." The Apostle
is denouncing the same party throughout. Some interpreters
make the first clause of ver. 13 a parenthesis,
supposing that "the circumcised" (participle present:
those being circumcised) are Gentile perverts now being
gained over to Judaism, while the foregoing and
following sentences relate to the Jewish teachers. But
the context does not intimate, nor indeed allow such a
change of subject. It is "the circumcised" of ver. 13 a
who in ver. 13 b wish to see the Galatians circumcised,
"in order to boast over their flesh,"—the same who, in
ver. 12, "desire to make a fair show in the flesh" and
to escape Jewish persecution. Reading this in the
light of the previous chapters, there seems to us no
manner of doubt as to the persons thus designated.
They are the Circumcisionists, Jewish Christians who
sought to persuade the Pauline Gentile Churches to
adopt circumcision and to receive their own legalistic
perversion of the gospel of Christ. The present tense
of the Greek participle, used as it is here with the
definite article, �ι πε�ιτεμνόμενοι (Revised Text). On this idiom, see Winer's
Grammar, p. 444; A. Buttmann's N. T. Grammar, p. 296. In ch. i.
23, and in ii. 2 (τ. δοκοῦσι), we have had instances of this usage.
The phrase is susceptible, however, of a wider application.
When Paul writes thus, he is thinking of
others besides the handful of troublers in Galatia. In
The policy of the Judaizers was dishonourable both
in spirit and in aim. They were false to Christ in
whom they professed to believe; and to the law which
they pretended to keep. They were facing both ways,
studying the safest, not the truest course, anxious in
truth to be friends at once with the world and Christ.
Their conduct has found many imitators, in men who
"make godliness a way of gain," whose religious course
is dictated by considerations of worldly self-interest.
A little persecution, or social pressure, is enough to
"turn them out of the way." They cast off their
Church obligations as they change their clothes, to
suit the fashion. Business patronage, professional advancement,
a tempting family alliance, the entrée into
some select and envied circle—such are the things for
which creeds are bartered, for which men put their
Nor are they less culpable who bring these motives into play, and put this kind of pressure on the weak and dependent. There are forms of social and pecuniary influence, bribes and threats quietly applied and well understood, which are hardly to be distinguished morally from persecution. Let wealthy and dominant Churches see to it that they be clear of these offences, that they make themselves the protectors, not the oppressors of spiritual liberty. The adherents that a Church secures by its worldly prestige do not in truth belong to the "kingdom that is not of this world." Such successes are no triumphs of the cross. Christ repudiates them. The glorying that attends proselytism of this kind is, like that of Paul's Judaistic adversaries, a "glorying in the flesh."
II. "But as for me," cries the Apostle, "far be it to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (ver. 14). Paul knows but one ground of exultation, one object of pride and confidence—his Saviour's cross.
Before he had received his gospel and seen the cross
in the light of revelation, like other Jews he regarded it
with horror. Its existence covered the cause of Jesus
with ignominy. It marked Him out as the object
of Divine abhorrence. To the Judaistic Christian the
cross was still an embarrassment. He was secretly
ashamed of a crucified Messiah, anxious by some means
to excuse the scandal and make amends for it in the
face of Jewish public opinion. But now this disgraceful
cross in the Apostle's eyes is the most glorious thing
Paul gloried in the cross of Christ because it manifested to him the character of God. The Divine love and righteousness, the entire range of those moral excellences which in their sovereign perfection belong to the holiness of God, were there displayed with a vividness and splendour hitherto inconceivable. "God so loved the world," and yet so honoured the law of right, that "He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." How stupendous is this sacrifice, which baffles the mind and overwhelms the heart! Nowhere in the works of creation, nor in any other dispensation of justice or mercy touching human affairs, is there a spectacle that appeals to us with an effect to be compared with that of the Sufferer of Calvary.
Let me look, let me think again. Who is He that
bleeds on that tree of shame? Why does the Holy
One of God submit to these indignities? Why those
cruel wounds, those heart-breaking cries that speak of
a soul pierced by sorrows deeper than all that bodily
anguish can inflict? Has the Almighty indeed forsaken
Him? Has the Evil One sealed his triumph in the
blood of the Son of God? Is it God's mercy to the
world, or is it not rather Satan's hate and man's utter
wickedness that stand here revealed? The issue
Now we know what the Maker of the worlds is like. "He that hath seen Me," said Jesus on Passion Eve, "hath seen the Father. From henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him." What the world knew before of the Divine character and intentions towards man was but "poor, weak rudiments." Now the believer has come to Peniel; like Jacob, he has "seen the face of God." He has touched the centre of things. He has found the secret of love.
Moreover, the Apostle gloried in the cross because it was the salvation of men. His love for men made him boast of it, no less than his zeal for God. The gospel burning in his heart and on his lips, was "God's power unto salvation, both to Jew and Greek." He says this not by way of speculation or theological inference, but as the testimony of his constant experience. It was bringing men by thousands from darkness into light, raising them from the slough of hideous vices and guilty despair, taming the fiercest passions, breaking the strongest chains of evil, driving out of human hearts the demons of lust and hate. This message, wherever it went, was saving men, as nothing had done before, as nothing else has done since. What lover of his kind would not rejoice in this?
We are members of a weak and suffering race,
groaning each in his own fashion under "the law of
sin and death," crying out ever and anon with Paul,
"O wretched man that I am!" If the misery of our
bondage was acute its darkness extreme, how great
The essence of the gospel revealed to Paul, as we have observed more than once, lay in its conception of the office of the cross of Christ. Not the Incarnation—the basis of the manifestation of the Father in the Son; not the sinless life and superhuman teaching of Jesus, which have moulded the spiritual ideal of faith and supplied its contents; not the Resurrection and Ascension of the Redeemer, crowning the Divine edifice with the glory of life eternal; but the sacrifice of the cross is the focus of the Christian revelation. This gives to the gospel its saving virtue. Round this centre all other acts and offices of the Saviour revolve, and from it receive their healing grace. From the hour of the Fall of man the manifestations of the Divine grace to him ever looked forward to Calvary; and to Calvary the testimony of that grace has looked backward ever since. "By this sign" the Church has conquered; the innumerable benefits with which her teaching has enriched mankind must all be laid in tribute at the foot of the cross.
The atonement of Jesus Christ demands from us a
faith like Paul's, a faith of exultation, a boundless enthusiasm
of gratitude and confidence. If it is worth
believing in at all, it is worth believing in heroically.
Let us so boast of it, so exhibit in our lives its power,
so spend ourselves in serving it, that we may justly
And the cross of Jesus Christ is the salvation of
men, just because it is the revelation of God. It is
"life eternal," said Jesus to the Father, "to know Thee."
The gospel does not save by mere pathos, but by
knowledge—by bringing about a right understanding
between man and his Maker, a reconciliation. It brings
God and man together in the light of truth. In this
revelation we see Him, the Judge and the Father, the
Lord of the conscience and the Lover of His children;
and we see ourselves—what our sins mean, what they
have done. God is face to face with the world. Holiness
and sin meet in the shock of Calvary, and flash
into light, each illuminated by contrast with the other.
And the view of what God is in Christ—how He judges,
how He pities us—once fairly seen, breaks the heart,
kills the love of sin. "The glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ," sitting on that thorn-crowned brow,
clothing that bleeding Form rent with the anguish of
Mercy's conflict with Righteousness on our behalf—it
is this which "shines in our hearts" as in Paul's, and
cleanses the soul by its pity and its terror. But this
is no dramatic scene, it is Divine, eternal fact. "We
have beheld and do testify that the Father sent the Son
to be the Saviour of the world. We know and have
believed the love that God hath to us" (
Such is the relation to God which the cross has
established for the Apostle. In what position does it
place him toward the world? To it, he tells us, he has
bidden farewell. Paul and the world are dead to each
Literally, a world—a whole world was crucified for Paul when his Lord died upon the cross. The world that slew Him put an end to itself, so far as he is concerned. He can never believe in it, never take pride in it, nor do homage to it any more. It is stripped of its glory, robbed of its power to charm or govern him. The death of shame that old "evil world" inflicted upon Jesus has, in Paul's eyes, reverted to itself; while for the Saviour it is changed into a life of heavenly glory and dominion. The Apostle's life is withdrawn from it, to be "hid with Christ in God."
This "crucifixion" is therefore mutual. The Apostle also "is crucified to the world." Saul the Pharisee was a reputable, religious man of the world, recognised by it, alive to it, taking his place in its affairs. But that "old man" has been "crucified with Christ." The present Paul is in the world's regard another person altogether—"the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things," no better than his crucified Master and worthy to share His punishment. He is dead—"crucified" to it. Faith in Jesus Christ placed a gulf, wide as that which parts the dead and living, between the Church of the Apostles and men around them. The cross parted two worlds wholly different. He who would go back into that other world, the world of godless self-pleasing and fleshly idolatry, must step over the cross of Christ to do it.
"To me," testifies Paul, "the world is crucified."
Worldliness has lost its old serenity irrecoverably. The cross incessantly disturbs it, and haunts its very dreams. Antichristian thought at the present time is one wide fever of discontent. It is sinking into the vortex of pessimism. Its mockery is louder and more brilliant than ever; but there is something strangely convulsive in it all; it is the laughter of despair, the dance of death.
Christ the Son of God has come down from the cross, as they challenged Him. But coming down, He has fastened there in His place the world that taunted Him. Struggle as it may, it cannot unloose itself from its condemnation, from the fact that it has killed its Prince of Life. The cross of Jesus Christ must save—or destroy. The world must be reconciled to God, or it will perish. On the foundation laid of God in Zion men will either build or break themselves for ever. The world that hated Christ and the Father, the world that Paul cast from him as a dead thing, cannot endure. It "passeth away, and the lust thereof."
"For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as many as shall walk by this rule, peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God."—Gal. vi. 15, 16.
This Pauline axiom is advanced to justify the confession of the Apostle made in ver. 14; it supports the protest of vv. 12-14 against the devotees of circumcision, who professed faith in Christ but were ashamed of His cross. "That Judaic rite in which you glory," he says, "is nothing. Ritual qualifications and disqualifications are abolished. Life in the Spirit, the new creation that begins with faith in Christ crucified—that is everything." The boasts of the Judaizers were therefore folly: they rested on "nothing." The Apostle's glorying alone was valid: the new world of "the kingdom of God," with its "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost," was there to justify it.
I. For neither is circumcision anything.—Judaism is abolished at a stroke! With it circumcision was everything. "The circumcision" and "the people of God" were in Israelitish phrase terms synonymous. "Uncircumcision" embraced all that was heathenish, outcast and unclean.
The Mosaic polity made the status of its subjects,
their relation to the Divine covenant, to depend on this
initiatory rite. "Circumcised the eighth day," the
child came under the rule and guardianship of the
sacred Law. In virtue of this mark stamped upon his
body, he was ipso facto a member of the congregation
of the Lord, bound to all its duties, so far as his age
The Judaists necessarily therefore made it their first object to enforce circumcision. If they secured this, they could carry everything; and the complete Judaizing of Gentile Christianity was only a question of time. This foundation laid, the entire system of legal obligation could be reared upon it (ch. v. 3). To resist the imposition of this yoke was for the Pauline Churches a matter of life and death. They could not afford to "yield by subjection—no, not for an hour." The Apostle stands forth as the champion of their freedom, and casts all Jewish pretensions to the winds when he says, "Neither is circumcision anything."
This absolute way of putting the matter must have
provoked the orthodox Jew to the last degree. The
privileges and ancestral glories of his birth, the truth
of God in His covenants and revelations to the fathers,
were to his mind wrapped up in this ordinance, and
belonged of right to "the Circumcision." To say that
circumcision is nothing seemed to him as good as
saying that the Law and the Prophets were nothing,
that Israel had no pre-eminence over the Gentiles, no
right to claim "the God of Abraham" as her God.
Hence the bitterness with which the Apostle was persecuted
by his fellow-countrymen, and the credence
given, even by orthodox Jewish Christians, to the
charge that he "taught to the Jews apostasy from
Moses" (
In his subsequent Epistle to the Romans the Apostle
is at pains to correct erroneous inferences drawn from
this and similar sayings of his concerning the Law.
He shows that circumcision, in its historical import,
was of the highest value. "What is the advantage of
the Jew? What the benefit of circumcision? Much
every way," he acknowledges. "Chiefly in that to
them were entrusted the oracles of God" (
Nor is uncircumcision anything. This is the counter-balancing
assertion, and it makes still clearer the bearing
of the former saying. Paul is not contending
against Judaism in any anti-Judaic spirit. He is not
for setting up Gentile in the place of Jewish customs
in the Church; he excludes both impartially. Neither,
he declares, have any place "in Christ Jesus," and
amongst the things that accompany salvation. Paul
has no desire to humiliate the Jewish section of the
Church; but only to protect the Gentiles from its
aggressions. He lays his hand on both parties and by
this evenly balanced declaration restrains each of them
from encroaching on the other. "Was any one called
circumcised"? he writes to Corinth: "let him not
renounce his circumcision. Hath any one been called
in uncircumcision? Let him not be circumcised." The
two states alike are "nothing" from the Christian
Christian Gentiles retained in some instances, doubtless, their former antipathy to Jewish practices. And while many of the Galatians were inclined to Legalism, others cherished an extreme repugnance to its usages. The pretensions of the Legalists were calculated to excite in the minds of enlightened Gentile believers a feeling of contempt, which led them to retort on Jewish pride with language of ridicule. Anti-Judaists would be found arguing that circumcision was a degradation, the brand of a servile condition; and that its possessor must not presume to rank with the free sons of God. In their opinion, uncircumcision was to be preferred and had "much advantage every way." Amongst Paul's immediate followers there may have been some who, like Marcion in the second century, would fain be more Pauline than the Apostle himself, and replied to Jewish intolerance with an anti-legal intolerance of their own. To this party it was needful to say, "Neither is uncircumcision anything."
The pagan in his turn has nothing for which to
boast over the man of Israel. This is the caution which
the Apostle urges on his Gentile readers so earnestly
in
The enemies of bigotry and narrowness too oft imbibe the same spirit. When others treat us with contempt, we are apt to pay them back in their own coin. They unchurch us, because we cannot pronounce their shibboleths; they refuse to see in our communion the signs of Christ's indwelling. It requires our best charity in that case to appreciate their excellencies and the fruit of the Spirit manifest in them. "I am of Cephas," say they; and we answer with the challenge "I of Paul." Sectarianism is denounced in a sectarian spirit. The enemies of form and ceremony make a religion of their Anti-ritualism. Church controversies are proverbially bitter; the love which "hopeth and believeth all things," under their influence suffers a sad eclipse. On both sides let us be on our guard. The spirit of partisanship is not confined to the assertors of Church prerogative. An obstinate and uncharitable pride has been known to spring up in the breasts of the defenders of liberty, in those who deem themselves the exponents of pure spiritual religion. "Thus I trample on the pride of Plato," said the Cynic, as he trod on the philosopher's sumptuous carpets; and Plato justly retorted, "You do it with greater pride."
The Apostle would fain lift his readers above the
level of this legalist contention. He bids them dismiss
their profitless debates respecting the import of circumcision,
the observance of Jewish feasts and sabbaths.
These debates were a mischief in themselves, destroying
the Church's peace and distracting men's minds from
the spiritual aims of the Gospel; they were fatal to the
dignity and elevation of the Christian life. When men
allow themselves to be absorbed by questions of this
II. What then has the Apostle to put in the place of ritual, as the matter of cardinal importance and chief study in the Church of Christ? He presents to view a new creation.
It is something new that he desiderates. Mosaism was effete. The questions arising out of it were dying, or dead. The old method of revelation which dealt with Jew and Gentile as different religious species, and conserved Divine truth by a process of exclusion and prohibition, had served its purpose. "The middle wall of partition was broken down." The age of faith and freedom had come, the dispensation of grace and of the Spirit. The Legalists minimised, they practically ignored the significance of Calvary. Race-distinctions and caste-privileges were out of keeping with such a religion as Christianity. The new creed set up a new order of life, which left behind it the discussions of rabbinism and the formularies of the legal schools as survivals of bygone centuries.
The novelty of the religion of the gospel was most
Whatever Christianity has accomplished in the outer
world—the various forms of worship and social life
in which it is embodied, the changed order of thought
and of civilisation which it is building up—is the
result of its influence over the hearts of individual men.
Christ, above all other teachers, addressed Himself
directly to the heart, whence proceed the issues of life.
There His gospel establishes its seat. The Christian is
the man with a "new heart." The prophets of the Old
Testament looked forward to this as the essential blessing
of religion, promised for the Messianic times (
What then, we further ask, is the character of this
hidden man of the heart, "created anew in Christ
Jesus"? Our Epistle has given us the answer. In
him "faith working by love" takes the place of circumcision
and uncircumcision—that is, of Jewish and
Gentile ceremonies and moralities, powerless alike to
save (ch. v. 6). Love comes forward to guarantee the
The Legalists, notwithstanding their idolatry of the
law, did not keep it. So the Apostle has said, without
fear of contradiction (ver. 13). But the men of the Spirit,
actuated by a power above law, in point of fact do keep
it, and "law's righteousness is fulfilled" in them (
Such regenerated men were the credentials of Paul's
gospel. As he looked on his Corinthian converts,
drawn out of the very sink of heathen corruption, he
could say, "The seal of my apostleship are ye in the
Such is Paul's canon, as he calls it in ver. 16—the
rule which applies to the faith and practice of every
Christian man, to the pretensions of all theological and
ecclesiastical systems. The true Christianity, the true
churchmanship, is that which turns bad men into good,
which transforms the slaves of sin into sons of God.
A true faith is a saving faith. The "new creation" is
the sign of the Creator's presence. It is God "who
quickeneth the dead" (
When the Apostle exalts character at the expense of ceremonial, he does this in a spirit the very opposite of religious indifference. His maxim is far removed from that expressed in the famous couplet of Pope:
The gospel of Christ is above all things a mode of
faith. The "new creature" is a son of God, seeking
to be like God. His conception of the Divine character
and of his own relationship thereto governs his
whole life. His "life is in the right," because his
heart is right with God. All attempts to divorce
morality from religion, to build up society on a secular
and non-religious basis, are indeed foredoomed to
failure. The experience of mankind is against them.
As a nation's religion has been, so its morals. The
ethical standard in its rise or fall, if at some interval
of time, yet invariably, follows the advance or decline
One cannot help wondering how Paul would have
applied his canon to the Church questions of our own
day. Would he perchance have said, "Episcopacy is
nothing, and Presbyterianism is nothing;—but keeping
the commandments of God"? Or might he have
interposed in another direction, to testify that "Church
Establishments are nothing, and Disestablishment is
nothing; charity is the one thing needful?" Nay,
can we even be bold enough to imagine the Apostle
declaring, "Neither Baptism availeth anything, nor
the Lord's Supper availeth anything,—apart from the
faith that works by love"? His rule at any rate
conveys an admonition to us when we magnify questions
of Church ordinance and push them to the front,
at the cost of the weightier matters of our common
faith. Are there not multitudes of Romanists on the
one hand who have, as we believe, perverted sacraments,
and Quakers on the other hand who have no
sacraments, but who have, notwithstanding, a penitent,
humble, loving faith in Jesus Christ? And their faith
saves them: who will doubt it? Although faith must
ordinarily suffer, and does in our judgement manifestly
suffer, when deprived of these appointed and most
precious means of its expression and nourishment.
But what authority have we to forbid to such believers
a place in the Body of Christ, in the brotherhood of
redeemed souls, and to refuse them the right hand of
"And as many as shall walk by this rule, peace be
on them and mercy, and upon the Israel of God."
Here is an Apostolic benediction for every loyal
Church. The "walk" that the Apostle approves is the
measured, even pace, the steady march Στοιχήσουσιν; comp. ch. v. 25.
Peace is followed by the mercy which guards and restores it. Mercy heals backslidings and multiplies pardons. She loves to bind up a broken heart, or a rent and distracted Church. Like the pillar of fire and cloud in the wilderness, this twofold blessing rests day and night upon the tents of Israel. Through all their pilgrimage it attends the children of Abraham, who follow in the steps of their father's faith.
With this tender supplication Paul brings his warnings
and dissuasives to an end. For the betrayers
of the cross he has stern indignation and alarms of
judgement. Towards his children in the faith nothing
but peace and mercy remains in his heart. As an
evening calm shuts in a tempestuous day, so this
blessing concludes the Epistle so full of strife and
agitation. We catch in it once more the chime of
the old benediction, which through all storm and peril
ever rings in ears attuned to its note: Peace shall be
upon Israel (
"From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen."—Gal. vi. 17, 18.
It only remains for him to append his signature.
We should expect him to do this in some striking and
special way. His first sentence (ch. i. 1-10) revealed
the profound excitement of spirit under which he is
labouring; not otherwise does he conclude. Ver. 17
Yet the words have the sound of triumph more than
of sorrow. Paul stands a conscious victor, though
wounded and with scars upon him that he will carry
to his grave. Whether this letter will serve its immediate
purpose, whether the defection in Galatia will be
stayed by it, or not, the cause of the cross is sure of its
triumph; his contention against its enemies has not
been in vain. The force of inspiration that uplifted
him in writing the Epistle, the sense of insight and
authority that pervades it, are themselves an earnest of
victory. The vindication of his authority in Corinth,
which, as we read the order of events, had very recently
occurred, gave token that his hold on the obedience of
the Gentile Churches was not likely to be destroyed,
and that in the conflict with legalism the gospel of
liberty was certain to prevail. His courage rises with
the danger. He writes as though he could already
say, "I have fought the good fight. Thanks be to
God, which always leadeth us in triumph" (
The warning of ver. 17 has the ring of Apostolic
dignity. "From henceforth let no man give me trouble!"
Paul speaks of himself as a sacred person. God's mark
"Troubles" indeed, and to spare, Paul had encountered.
He has just passed through the darkest
experience of his life. The language of the Second
Epistle to Corinth is a striking commentary upon this
verse. "We are pressed on every side," he writes,
"perplexed, pursued, smitten down" (ch. iv. 8, 9).
His troubles came not only from his exhausting labours
and hazardous journeys; he was everywhere pursued
by the fierce and deadly hatred of his fellow-countrymen.
Even within the Church there were men who
made it their business to harass him and destroy his
work. No place was safe for him—not even the bosom
of the Church. On land or water, in the throngs of
the city or the solitudes of the desert, his life was in
hourly jeopardy (
Beside all this, "the care of the Churches" weighed
on his mind heavily. There was "no rest" either for
his flesh or spirit (
But he has risen from his sick bed. He has been
"comforted by the coming of Titus" with better news
from Corinth (
One catches in this sentence too an undertone of
entreaty, a confession of weariness. Paul is tired of
strife. "Woe is me," he might say, "that I sojourn in
Meshech, that I dwell among the tents of Kedar! My
soul hath long had her dwelling with him that hateth
peace." "Enmities, ragings, factions, divisions"—with
what a painful emphasis he dwells in the last chapter on
these many forms of discord. He has known them all.
For months he has been battling with the hydra-headed
brood. He longs for an interval of rest. He seems to
say, "I pray you, let me be at peace. Do not vex me
any more with your quarrels. I have suffered enough."
But what an argument is this with which Paul enforces his plea,—"for I bear the brand of Jesus in my body!"
"The stigmata of Jesus"—what does he mean? It
is "in my body"—some marks branded or punctured
on the Apostle's person, distinguishing him from other
men, conspicuous and humiliating, inflicted on him as
Christ's servant, and which so much resembled the
inflictions laid on the Redeemer's body that they are
called "the marks of Jesus." No one can say precisely
what these brands consisted in. But we know enough
of the previous sufferings of the Apostle to be satisfied
that he carried on his person many painful marks of
violence and injury. His perils endured by land and
sea, his imprisonments, his "labour and travail, hunger
and thirst, cold and nakedness," his three shipwrecks,
the "night and day spent in the deep," were sufficient
to break down the strength of the stoutest frame; they
had given him the look of a worn and haggard man.
Add to these the stoning at Lystra, when he was
dragged out for dead. "Thrice" also had he been
beaten with the Roman rods; "five times" with the
thirty-nine stripes of the Jewish scourge (
Is it to these last afflictions, cruel and shameful
they were in the extreme, that the Apostle specially
His scars were badges of dishonour to worldly eyes.
But to Paul himself these tokens were very precious.
"Now I rejoice in my sufferings for you," he writes
His condition inspired reverence in all who loved and
honoured Jesus Christ. Paul's Christian brethren were
moved by feelings of the tenderest respect by the sight
of his wasted and crippled form. "His bodily presence
is weak (
Under the expression "stigmata of Jesus" there is
couched a reference to the practice of marking criminals
and runaway slaves with a brand burnt into the flesh,
which is perpetuated in our English use of the Greek
words stigma and stigmatize. A man so marked was
The term stigmata had also another and different
signification. It applied to a well-known custom of
religious devotees to puncture, or tattoo, upon themselves
the name of their God, or other sign expressive
of their devotion (
The words I bear—not united, as in our own idiom,
but standing the pronoun at the head and the verb at
the foot of the sentence—have each of them a special
emphasis. I—in contrast with his opponents, man-pleasers,
shunning Christ's reproach; and bear he says
exultantly—"this is my burden, these are the marks
The stigmatization of Paul, his puncturing with the
wounds of Jesus, has been revived in later times in a
manner far remote from anything that he imagined or
would have desired. Francis of Assisi in the year
1224 A.D. received in a trance the wound-prints of the
Saviour on his body; and from that time to his death,
it is reported, the saint had the physical appearance
of one who had suffered crucifixion. Other instances,
to the number of eighty, have been recorded in the
Roman Catholic Church of the reproduction, in more
or less complete form, of the five wounds of Jesus and
the agonies of the cross; chiefly in the case of nuns.
The last was that of Louise Lateau, who died in
Belgium in the year 1883. That such phenomena
have occurred, there is no sufficient reason to doubt.
It is difficult to assign any limits to the power of the
human mind over the body in the way of sympathetic
imitation. Since St. Francis' day many Romanist
divines have read the Apostle's language in this sense;
but the interpretation has followed rather than given
rise to this fulfilment. In whatever light these manifestations
may be regarded, they are a striking witness
to the power of the cross over human nature. Protracted
meditation on the sufferings of our Lord, aided
This mode of knowing Christ's sufferings "after the flesh," morbid and monstrous as we deem it to be, is the result of an aspiration which however misdirected by Catholic asceticism, is yet the highest that belongs to the Christian life. Surely we also desire, with Paul, to be "made conformable to the death of Christ." On our hearts His wounds must be impressed. Along the pathway of our life His cross has to be borne. To all His disciples, with the sons of Zebedee, He says, "Ye shall indeed drink of My cup; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized." But "it is the Spirit that quickeneth," said Jesus; "the flesh profiteth nothing." The pains endured by the body for His sake are only of value when, as in Paul's case, they are the result and the witness of an inward communion of the Spirit, a union of the will and the intelligence with Christ.
The cup that He would have us drink with Him, is
one of sorrow for the sins of men. His baptism is that
of pity for the misery of our fellows, of yearning over
souls that perish. It will not come upon us without
costing many a pang. If we receive it there will be
ease to surrender, gain and credit to renounce, self to
be constantly sacrificed. We need not go out of our
way to find our cross; we have only not to be blind
to it, not to evade it when Christ sets it before us. It
may be part of the cross that it comes in a common,
unheroic form; the service required is obscure; it
consists of a multitude of little, vexing, drudging sacrifices
in place of the grand and impressive sacrifice,
which we should be proud to make. To be martyred
Yes, conformity of spirit to the cross is the mark of Jesus. "If we suffer with Him"—so the Apostolic Churches used to sing—"we shall also be glorified together." In our recoil from the artificial penances and mortifications of former ages, we are disposed in these days to banish the idea of mortification altogether from our Christian life. Do we not study our personal comfort in an un-Christlike fashion? Are there not many in these days, bearing the name of Christ, who without shame and without reproof lay out their plans for winning the utmost of selfish prosperity, and put Christian objects in the second place? How vain for them to cry "Lord, Lord!" to the Christ who "pleased not Himself!" They profess at the Lord's Table to "show His death;" but to show that death in their lives, to "know" with Paul "the fellowship of His sufferings," is the last thing that enters into their minds. How the scars of the brave Apostle put to shame the self-indulgence, the heartless luxury, the easy friendship with the world, of fashionable Christians! "Be ye followers of me," he cries, "as I also of Christ." He who shuns that path cannot, Jesus said, be My disciple.
So the blessed Apostle has put his mark to this Epistle. To the Colossians from his prison he writes, "Remember my bonds." And to the Galatians, "Look on my wounds." These are his credentials; these are the armorial bearings of the Apostle Paul. He places the seal of Jesus, the sign-manual of the wounded hand upon the letter written in His name.
THE BENEDICTION.
One benediction the Apostle has already uttered, in ver. 16. But that was a general wish, embracing all who should walk according to the spiritual rule of Christ's kingdom. On his readers specifically he still has his blessing to pronounce. He does it in language differing in this instance very little from that he is accustomed to employ.
"The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" is the distinctive blessing of the New Covenant. It is to the Christian the supreme good of life, including or carrying with it every other spiritual gift. Grace is Christ's property. It descended with the Incarnate Saviour into the world, coming down from God out of heaven. His life displayed it; His death bestowed it on mankind. Raised to His heavenly throne, He has become on the Father's behalf the dispenser of its fulness to all who will receive it. There exalted, thence bestowing on men "the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness," He is known and worshipped as our Lord Jesus Christ.
What this grace of God in Christ designs, what it accomplishes in believing hearts, what are the things that contradict it and make it void, this Epistle has largely taught us. Of its pure, life-giving stream the Galatians already had richly tasted. From "Christ's grace" they were now tempted to "remove" (ch. i. 6). But the Apostle hopes and prays that it may abide with them.
"With your spirit," he says; for this is the place
of its visitation, the throne of its power. The spirit
of man, breathed upon by the Holy Spirit of God,
After all his fears for his wayward flock, all his chidings and reproofs, forgiveness and confidence are the last thoughts in Paul's heart: "Brethren" is the last word that drops from the Apostle's pen,—followed only by the confirmation of his devout Amen.
To his readers also the writer of this book takes leave to address the Apostle Paul's fraternal benediction: The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen.
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