This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I delivered this message at Spring Creek Bible Church on October 27, 2019, as part of the Galatians series. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you again for this chance to look into Paul’s letter to the Galatians—the truth it teaches about you, your character, your plan, your promises, your gospel, and how we fit into what you’re doing in the world. We need your help; our time is in vain unless you meet with us and bless the teaching, reading, hearing, and applying of your Word. Meet with us tonight by your gracious Spirit, the down payment of our future inheritance. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Last week we looked at Galatians 3:1–22, making two points: Paul’s exhortation not to turn back to the old way of works and flesh but to continue in the new way of faith in the Spirit, and his teaching on the biblical covenants—how the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants relate. Those hang together like this: a right understanding of the covenants insulates us from false teaching that would turn us from the one true gospel.
Just this week Shanna found an interview with the prosperity preacher and multimillionaire Kenneth Copeland, who defended his lavish lifestyle by appealing to Galatians 3 and the Abrahamic covenant. He said, in effect: the Jewish people believed in wealth—“the blessing of Abraham”—and Abraham was extremely wealthy; Galatians 3 says that if you belong to Christ you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise—“and his promise was great wealth.” This is a perfect illustration of how dangerous a misunderstanding of God’s covenants can be. Copeland is right that we are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise—but dead wrong that the promise to Abraham was the blessing of great physical wealth. How many people who don’t know how God’s plan of redemption fits together are susceptible to that kind of false teaching?
Tonight we’ll continue through the end of chapter 4, assuming last week’s foundation—the structure and argument, the background, the eschatological undercurrent, the key themes, and the point about false dichotomies. By way of quick context: at the end of chapter 3 Paul had shown that the Mosaic law, coming 430 years after the promise, didn’t set aside God’s promises to Abraham (3:15–18) and didn’t become the way to receive the inheritance—faith remained the way, because the gracious character of the promise requires it (if law-keeping replaced the promise, the inheritance would be wages earned, not a gift of grace). The law was given for many reasons, but Paul’s focus is its role of “imprisoning everything under sin” (3:22) and exposing sin as sinful (3:19), pointing to its own inability to solve the problem and to the need for a better, permanent solution—so that the promise might be given to those who believe in Jesus.
The Text: Galatians 3:23–4:31
Tonight’s text runs from 3:23 through the end of chapter 4. Paul writes that “before faith came, we were held captive under the law….So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came….Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith”—“there is neither Jew nor Greek…slave nor free…male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” “Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.” He compares an heir who is a child, “no different from a slave” until the time set by his father, to our being “enslaved to the elementary principles of the world” until “the fullness of time” when “God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons”—and God sent “the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” He then pleads with them not to “turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles,” observing “days and months and seasons and years,” and appeals to them tenderly, recalling how they first welcomed him. Finally he uses Abraham’s two sons—Ishmael by the slave woman Hagar, born “according to the flesh,” and Isaac by the free woman, born “through promise”—as a figure of the two covenants, concluding, “we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.”
Tonight’s message has three points: we need to embrace our new identity in this new age (3:23–4:7), understand and feel the consequences of turning back (4:8–20), and see how the law itself teaches the superiority of the promise (4:21–31).
Embrace Your New Identity in the New Age
Paul contrasts the old age (3:23–25; 4:1–3) with the new age (3:26–29; 4:4–7), alternating back and forth, and the temporal words pile up—before, until, now, no longer, when. He’s stressing that the old age is passing and the new age has dawned in Christ; his coming was the great turning point of both redemptive history and all human history. That’s where the title of these messages comes from: faith is presented as something that “came” when Christ came—“before faith came,” “until the coming faith would be revealed,” “now that faith has come.” As I said last week, “faith” here is shorthand for Christ, the gospel, the new covenant—this whole new age. And the law, “added because of transgressions until the offspring should come” (3:19), is now personified as a guardian who held us in custody while we were underage, until we came of age and entered the privileges appointed by the Father.
Some teach that the church age is a kind of parenthesis, a temporary sidetrack in God’s plan. But Paul argues the opposite: it’s the Mosaic covenant that was the parenthesis—a temporary, providentially planned detour—while this new age of faith is the fulfillment. As D. A. Carson comments, “the law covenant is no longer the high point….It has become almost a parenthesis”; Paul “comes within a whisker of treating the Sinai covenant as a parenthesis.” There’s also a second level here: redemptive history is a picture of personal salvation. The “when” is first the time before and after Christ came—but Paul intends both a macro and a micro reading: before we’re saved we’re like those under the old covenant, and after we come to know the Lord we live in this new age of Christ.
These next verses overflow with our identity in Christ: we are children and sons of God, one people, Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. How did that become our identity? By being united to Christ—notice “in Christ Jesus,” “baptized into Christ,” “clothed with Christ,” “belong to Christ” (vv. 26–29)—and we come to be in Christ, who is Abraham’s seed, through faith, so that the promise made to Abraham and his seed extends to us as heirs. Don’t read past these glorious truths. Imagine reading them for the first time: we Gentiles are members of God’s family—the God of the universe against whom we rebelled—and this isn’t just spiritual talk; it’s objective reality, more real than the building we’re in. We are his sons and daughters, whom he deeply loves, and by extension brothers and sisters of Jesus (Romans 8:29; Hebrews 2:11). We’re on equal footing with God’s old-covenant people, grafted in as co-heirs with Christ of all his rich promises (Romans 8:17). The inheritance of the world’s richest heirs—Bezos, Gates, Buffett—is a drop in the ocean compared to the inheritance that is ours by adoption into God’s family through union with Christ. Do you believe that tonight? If you get nothing else from this message, let that enthrall your heart afresh—talk about it on the ride home; relish the glory of your identity in Christ.
The Mystery and the Promise
A word about “mystery.” The word doesn’t appear in our passage, but the concept looms large. In the New Testament, “mystery” refers to something concealed under the Old Testament and revealed in the New—present in seed form, growing clearer over time, and disclosed most fully after the death and resurrection of Jesus through his apostles. The usual picture is a seed becoming a seedling, then a sapling, then a full-grown tree. Here’s another. As a teenager I’d work in my grandfather’s woodshop, and he loved his lathe. The first time, we grabbed a gnarled old piece of firewood, and he said, “Let’s turn this into something.” I stood there dumbfounded that it could become anything—but as I chipped and shaved, a bowl took shape, far better looking than the ugly block we started with. The bowl was, in a sense, in there all along; you just couldn’t see it until someone revealed it. Scripture names the kingdom, Christ in the church, and the gospel as this mystery, and defines it in passages like Romans 11 (Israel’s partial hardening until the Gentiles come in), Ephesians 3 (through the gospel “the Gentiles are fellow heirs…members of the same body…partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus”), and Colossians 1 (“Christ in you, the hope of glory”). In Galatians this mystery surfaces at every turn: Gentiles receiving the promised Spirit by faith, becoming Abraham’s seed and children of God, heirs of the promise, first-class citizens on equal footing with the Jews—none of which was expected. The Old Testament revealed that God’s plan would reach the Gentiles, but not exactly how; the expectation was that they’d be brought into Israel as proselytes, still second-class. Instead, in his wisdom God saved the Gentiles not by bringing them into Israel but by bringing them into Christ.
Now the promise made to Abraham’s seed. The word “promise” occurs eleven times in chapters 3–4, and I’d argue all refer to the promise(s) made to Abraham—usually singular, twice plural. God promised Abraham to make him a great nation, to bless him and make his name great, to make him a blessing, to give land to him and his offspring, offspring as numerous as the stars, a covenant with his seed, many nations, kings, and that he would be God to Abraham and his seed. So what does Paul have in mind when he says the promise is given to those who believe, that if we belong to Christ we are heirs according to the promise, that we “like Isaac” are children of promise? Last week I argued that justification and the Spirit are included—but is that all? I think it’s more than a generic blessing, for three reasons. First, Paul uses the plural “promises” and says they all belong to Christ—and we’re in Christ, so they belong to us (the singular is best taken as the whole Abrahamic covenant of promise). Second, the promises were made to Christ: “to your seed” (singular), “who is Christ” (3:16); that exact phrase appears eight times in Genesis, and all of them include the land—so at minimum the promises to Abraham, made also to Christ and extending to us, include an eternal inheritance. Romans 4:13–17 broadens this: God promised Abraham and his offspring that he would be “heir of the world,” a promise that comes by faith and grace to all Abraham’s offspring, Jew and Gentile.
Third, the rest of the New Testament ties the promise to the Spirit and to an inheritance guaranteed. “All the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Corinthians 1:20), and we were “sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:13–14)—the Spirit is the down payment guaranteeing the full inheritance to come, an already-and-not-yet reality. So Paul’s argument is that through faith we’re united to Christ and share in all that belongs to him, including the promises of the Abrahamic covenant made to Christ, the true seed of Abraham. We’ve received the Spirit now; the full inheritance is yet to come. What it means to inherit the land—perhaps broadened to inheriting “the world” (Romans 4:13)—has already-and-not-yet aspects I’ll leave you to ponder; but it’s clear these promises are ours in Christ because we are Abraham’s seed. (This theme of being “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ,” Romans 8:17, is well worth a study of its own.)
Feel the Consequences of Turning Back (4:8–20)
Paul now reiterates his warning from 3:1–5 against turning back from faith and the Spirit to the law and the flesh, with Christ’s coming as the pivot. Two things stand out. First, what it means to turn back. The alternate path is mutually exclusive to the gospel—you can’t have both—and the consequences are dire: slavery, idolatry, and failure to inherit the promises. The Galatians “used to be slaves to those who by nature are not gods” (v. 8), which Paul calls “weak and worthless elementary principles,” and now they’re “turning back” (v. 9). Here’s the shocking part: most of these Gentiles had never kept the Mosaic law; they’d come out of pagan idolatry—yet Paul equates their turning to the law with turning back to that paganism. In this new age of fulfillment, there’s little difference between pagan idolatry and Mosaic law-keeping; both are slavery, part of the old way set aside by Christ. Their “observing days and months and seasons and years” (v. 10) is almost certainly the Jewish ceremonial law—and submitting to it is no better than returning to their former false gods.
Second, Paul’s passionate appeal not to turn back. He fears his gospel labor among them was in vain, and he shifts from rigorous argument to raw emotion, much as he appealed to Philemon for Onesimus—a reminder that there’s a place both for careful exegesis and for heartfelt passion. He recalls that he became like them (a Jew living like a Gentile, no longer under the law), and now they, Gentiles, are becoming like Jews; so he pleads, “become like me, for I became like you.” He remembers how they first met—he came to them sick, and though his illness was a trial, they welcomed him “as an angel of God,” and would have “torn out” their own eyes for him—yet now their loyalty has shifted to the Judaizers. Imagine the pain: what if our pastors went away for three months, false teaching crept in, and the church’s loyalty shifted to a new false teacher? Paul calls them “my little children,” feeling like a mother in the pains of childbirth all over again, longing to see Christ formed in them. The takeaway is the place of godly emotion in ministry—there’s a time to address the mind with truth and a time to appeal to the heart with compassion, and Paul, with his brilliant mind and passionate pastoral heart, models both.
The Law Teaches the Superiority of the Promise (4:21–31)
Finally, Paul shows that the law itself teaches that trying to be under the law now is to reject the promises and choose slavery. He already hinted at this: the law was added “until the offspring should come” (3:19), which implies it would be subtracted once the offspring came; it was our guardian “until Christ came,” and now “we are no longer under a guardian.” He drives it home with Abraham’s two sons. Ishmael, by the slave woman Hagar, was born “according to the flesh” (by human effort); Hagar stands for Mount Sinai—where the law was given—representing the old covenant, and those under it, the “present Jerusalem,” are in slavery. Isaac, by the free woman Sarah, was born “through promise” by the power of the Spirit; Sarah represents the heavenly Jerusalem, giving birth to children of promise, and the result is freedom. Reading the story rightly, we see that being under the law was never God’s ongoing plan—it was temporary and preparatory, fulfilled in Christ—so to seek to be under the law now is to become children of Hagar and cut oneself off from the promise.
Was this really there in the Old Testament? Our commitment to the inspiration and authority of Scripture requires us to say yes—Paul asks, “do you not listen to the law?”—it was there in seed form, part of progressive revelation, now visible with Christian eyes on this side of the cross. As Carson notes, it’s better to think of this as typology than allegory: in allegory the interpreter imports the key from outside (as some in the early church did, reading in all sorts of things that weren’t there), but Paul isn’t doing that—and God isn’t calling us to go hunting for hidden meanings that aren’t present. Rather, we learn from Paul that things truly present in seed form can now be seen through the gospel, with Jesus and the apostles as our guides. The application is powerful and full of irony: the unbelieving Jewish people, by clinging to the law in unbelief, are no longer grouped with Abraham’s special seed (Isaac, Jacob, Israel) but have become like Ishmael—sons of the slave woman, cut off from the promised inheritance—while believing Jews and Gentiles are the children of promise (Paul makes a similar point in Romans 9:6–8, that not all of Abraham’s physical descendants are the true Israel).
So, in these last days, in the fullness of time—this new age of faith and the Spirit—God calls people of all languages, tribes, and nations to faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, inviting all to become children of Abraham, sons of God, and heirs of the promises, which belong to everyone united to Christ by faith. To inherit them, we mustn’t turn back to our pre-Christian ways or to the old era when the law governed how people related to God—the law served its purpose and pointed to Christ, and to cling to it as a way of relating to God is to reject the gospel, testify that Christ died in vain, and put ourselves under a curse and into slavery. So tonight, believe afresh this glorious gospel of faith; persevere in it and never move beyond it; make it the heart of your Christian experience, your parenting, your relationships. See God’s plan of redemption climaxing in Christ, and joyfully join what he’s doing in building his global, multiethnic church—praying, giving, going, and welcoming everyone into this new way of faith, regardless of race, status, gender, or language.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this chance to study these rich chapters—there’s so much here for our minds, hearts, and hands. Help us to ponder, study, and dig into these truths about your covenants and your grand plan of redemption, planned before time and moving toward its glorious culmination. Help us apply these truths of faith, the Spirit, and freedom—of being your sons and daughters, heirs of the promises—to our hearts; comfort us with them when we’re weak and downcast, and fill us with confident hope in your future plans, far greater than we can imagine. Convict us where we’re living out of sync with your gospel, and align us by your Spirit to fulfill your purposes as your body in this new age of faith. Above all, help us never to tire of this glorious gospel, never to move beyond it to our own efforts, to fads, to the ways of the flesh and of slavery. In Jesus’ name, amen.