Introduction: Galatians 2.15-21 and 3.1-4.31
Galatians 2.15-21 is something of a tightly packed paragraph that captures the essence of Paul’s theology. In it, we hear the Paul who spoke regularly on this subject, in synagogues, before Gentiles, and to his churches. We hear themes such as justification by faith not works, justification through faith in Jesus Christ not the Law, the justification of sinners, dying to the Law and living to God, the crucifixion of Jesus as loving and life-giving and God’s grace, and participating in Jesus’ crucifixion and life. These inter-related theological themes come at us in this paragraph like a tidal wave. In chapters 3 and 4 of Galatians, Paul unpacks these themes. In this lesson, I want to approach what Paul says by asking, ‘What part of this theology should Jews who knew nothing of Jesus have already expected by reading the Old Testament?’ Imagine Jews in a synagogue in Galatia being told that a Jew, a Pharisee, and a student of rabbi Gamaliel from Jerusalem had arrived and would speak to them that day. How much of the Gospel would they already have heard in the Scriptures, even if they were about to hear of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
The reason for asking this question lies in Galatians 2.15, where Paul says, ‘We, by nature Jews and not sinners from the Gentiles, know’ (my trans.). Paul’s teaching from here through chapter 4 rests on what the Jews should have known from the Scriptures and on the fulfillment of the Scriptures in Jesus Christ. Jews and Christians should agree theologically about so much; what Paul wanted them to see is that their theology was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In chapters 3 and 4, we see how he argued this.
1. What Goes for Jews also Goes for Gentiles
Paul is concerned to say that, as far as the Gospel goes, the same applies to Jews and Gentiles. There is not one plan of salvation for the Jews and one or more for the Gentiles. There are not different paths to God. What goes for the Jews also goes for the Gentiles.
He is the apostle to the Gentiles, and he has just stated that the apostles in Jerusalem had accepted the Gospel message that he had been proclaiming. He mentioned earlier in chapter 2 that some of the Jews sat at different tables from the Gentiles in the Church of Antioch. He opposed them. He also mentioned that the pillar apostles in Jerusalem accepted the Gospel he had been preaching to the Gentiles. There was to be no Jewish and Gentile denominations in the Church. There is only one Gospel.
In the course of what Paul says in these chapters, he makes the point that both Jews and Gentiles are children of Abraham. This would have set the congregation on the edge of their seats. In the synagogues of the diaspora, you might find not only Jews but also some Gentile visitors and even proselytes. Just what was the status of these Gentile worshippers? Paul was saying that there was no difference: both were children of Abraham. But did the Gentiles have to do something to achieve that status, like get circumcised, follow Jewish customs for food, or participate in the Jews’ cultural festivals? How Jewish did a Gentile proselyte need to become?
Paul’s answer to these questions was mind-blowing. The issue that needed attention first was one for the Jews. Did they not know that righteousness and justification did not come from the Law but from faith in God? Paul equalises the situation for Jews and Gentiles. They are not Jews and Gentile sinners but Jewish transgressors and Gentile sinners. Both had fallen down the same well of sin and needed God’s help to get out. Both needed to put their faith in God, not in works of the Law.
2. No man is made righteous from works of the Law
Some Jews might have believed that they could become righteous through doing works of the Law. Yet Paul firmly believed that a proper reading of the Old Testament did not support this. He says, ‘We who are by nature Jews ... know that no man is made righteous from works of Law’. This is not some belief he came to because he was a Christian. He says, ‘who are by nature Jews’—Jews by nature, not Jews who are Christians. This is an amazing statement. Jews do not claim that they produce righteousness by works of the Law. How is that?
3. One living by the Law must keep all the Law
A third theological point that Jews should have realised already is that one cannot be said to be righteous while transgressing even one small part of the Law. Nobody keeps all the Law. One infraction brings the whole building of our own righteousness through the Law tumbling down. Later in Galatians, Paul says, ‘For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law’ (Galatians 6.13). In Galatians 3, Paul points out that one must do all things written in the Law. The legal standard for righteousness is absolute. It is too high a bar. The Law says, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them’ (Deuteronomy 27.26; Galatians 3.10). This may come across, as it does in Deuteronomy 27, as an exhortation to abide by all the laws in God’s Law. However, just a few chapters later, in Deuteronomy 30.1, we read that all the blessings and curses of God’s covenant would come upon the Jews. They would not keep all the law. What, then, were they to do? Deuteronomy 30.6 says, ‘And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.’ The answer for sinners seeking righteousness does not come from their own, redoubled efforts at obedience but from God’s transformation of the heart and soul of the sinner.
4. The Law does not give life.
Paul is aware that the Law says about its laws, ‘The one who does them shall live by them’ (Leviticus 18.5). He quotes this verse in 3.12. However, no one does every law, and so no one can live by them. Paul will give Scriptural proof of this in his letter to the Romans, when he quotes Psalm 14.3: ‘there is none who does good, not even one’ (Romans 3.10). He assumes the point here in Galatians and jumps to the conclusion, saying, ‘if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law’ (Galatians 3.21). Once one realizes that one cannot keep all the Law, one knows something else is needed to make one righteous.
One further realises that laws by their very nature do not do this. Laws are there as warnings. A law about speeding does not make people good drivers. If one speeds, the Law can punish but not undo the speeding. One must become a better driver, a better person, and that must come from somewhere else than speeding signs. As Paul says, laws do not give life.
5. What does bring righteousness and life, even to those breaking the Law, is faith.
Paul says that the Old Testament testifies to the fact that righteousness comes by faith, not works. This is not something he dreamed up. It is right there in the Old Testament. Paul could have quoted many Old Testament passages in the Psalms about having faith, hope, or trust in God. Here in Galatians, he presents two passages to demonstrate this fact. One passage explains that righteousness comes by faith, the other that the righteous will live by faith. The first passage is Genesis 15.6: Abraham ‘believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness’ (Galatians 3.6). Abraham’s belief or faith was reckoned by God as righteousness. Moreover, Paul reminds his readers, God promised Abraham, ‘In you shall all nations be blessed’ (Genesis 12.3). Paul reckons, therefore, that the Old Testament foresaw that the Gentiles would be justified by faith (Galatians 3.8). The second passage is Habakkuk 2.4: ‘the righteous shall live by his faith’ (Galatians 3.11). Habakkuk presents the righteous person like a watchman waiting for God’s salvation to come. The watchman sees the horrific hordes of Chaldean locusts eating up the land before them, but he watches for the Lord to save. This watching is faith, faith in God. Such a watchman is deemed righteous. Righteousness does not come through the efforts we muster through obedience to the Law in the face of sin, it comes from God to the person of faith, the one who puts his hope in God.
6. The actual function of the Law is to bring death, not life.
There are two points to consider here. First, Paul says, ‘For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God’ (Galatians 2.19). The important words here are death and life. The Law brings death because we—everyone—do not keep all of it, as we have seen. Thus, we stand condemned before the Law. If we are to live, then, we must live by something other than the Law. We must live to God. That is, we must find life from Him and not from the Law. He can give us life, and therefore we live to Him. The second point is that the Law also brought death to Jesus. The two points are brought together when Paul says, ‘I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Galatians 2.20). Somehow, we are able to move through the Law that condemns us and puts us to death to justification that gives us life. If we are to focus only on what those who were by nature Jews knew about all this, we have to stop here. We are left with ‘somehow’, wondering how. Yet there is a hint in the Old Testament, and this takes us to the seventh point.
7. The Law brings a curse, but through it, God’s blessing.
The Law that condemns leaves humanity cursed (Galatians 3.10, as we have already seen, quoting Deuteronomy 27.18), and it says, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’ (Deuteronomy 21.23; Galatians 3.13). While it is not obvious from reading the Old Testament before Christ that God’s ‘somehow’ for bringing righteousness and life would come through the Law’s condemnation and curse and death, and it is not obvious that this would be through the curse of being hung on a tree, it is rather remarkable that this is what happened.
Paul says, ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Galatians 3.13). Paul not only speaks of us as cursed. He elsewhere says that we were enemies of God (Romans 5.10). He says that we were under His wrath (Romans 1.18; 5.9). Jesus took on Himself this curse. He took on Himself God’s wrath toward sinners because of their sin. He took on Himself our being enemies of God. He took on Himself our sin and condemnation itself. He took on Himself the curse of breaking God’s Law under which we have lived. In 2 Corinthians 5.21 Paul concludes, ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’. The Jew before the coming of Christ knew that God’s salvation was yet to come; he or she just did not know how. The logic of taking on the curse through death was the logic of Old Testament sacrifice. That is why the Jews regularly made sin offerings at the Temple. The offering of a goat that received Israel’s sins on the Day of Atonement and was led away graphically illustrated to all that sin and the curse needed to be received by a sacrificial victim and sent away, removed from us.
8. God’s promise to all came through one.
The Jew knew that Abraham’s faith had to do with God’s promise to him and to his seed (Genesis 12.7; Galatians 3.16). Readers assume this means to all Abraham’s offspring, but Paul uses the grammar to make a point in light of Christ. He says that the verse in Genesis says ‘seed’, not ‘seeds’. God’s promise was to Abraham was that he and Sarah, around 100 years old, would have a child, Isaac. Through this one son, all Israel would come.
The promise of a seed and Abraham’s response of faith resulted in him being considered righteousness. The promise led to faith led to righteousness. In this we find the fuller expression that God’s grace leads to our response of faith in one person, Jesus Christ. The Gospel, then, is before and after the Law, which stands in the middle and serves a different purpose, as already noted. Paul knows he has narrowly interpreted seed, but he made his point that the Abrahamic way of faith involved God fulfilling His promise through Christ Jesus. At the end of Galatians 3, Paul widens the meaning of ‘seed’ to include all who are in Christ, just as all Israel was in Abraham or even the ‘seed’ of Isaac. In fact, in Galatians 4.21-31, Paul returns to make that very point with an allegory about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar. Sarah stands for the promise, Hagar for the Law. Each produced a son for Abraham. The promise made to Sarah produced Isaac, through whom Israel came. The Law produced Ishmael, through whom the inheritance did not come.
9. The promise to Abraham comes before and after the Law. The Law was our child-minder until we received the promise of inheritance.
The Jew knew that Abraham came 430 years before Moses. Thus, the Law was a codicil added to the covenant with Abraham, and codicils do not change what still stands in the covenant (Galatians 3.15-18). Thus, the promise that preceded the Law was never annulled. Just what did this codicil add to the promise? It was added because of transgressions (Galatians 3.19). The Law functioned like a slave in charge of children, who in Greek is called a paidagōgos. The ESV translates this word as ‘guardian’. I might suggest ‘child-minder’ as a better translation. He did more than guard children in the household. He was charged with raising the child up properly. Listen to this exchange in one of Plato’s lesser works:
‘And now there is one thing more you [a boy] must tell me. Do they [your parents] let you control your own self, or will they not trust you in that either? Of course they do not, he replied. But some one controls you? Yes, he said, my tutor [paidagogos] here. Is he a slave? Why, certainly; he belongs to us, he said. What a strange thing, I exclaimed; a free man controlled by a slave! But how does this tutor actually exert his control over you? By taking me to school, I suppose, he replied. And your schoolmasters, can it be that they also control you?’ (Plato, Lysis 208c].
Paul is working with the same thoughts in Galatians 3.24-25. While the codicil of the Law applies to us, we are like children needing the upbringing of a slave. We are under a slave’s rules. But when we grow up, we are the heirs, not under a slave. We receive the promised inheritance of the father (Galatians 4.1-7). The Jew should have known that the secondary status of the Law to what was promised to Abraham by faith pointed to the inheritance coming to heirs and not on the basis of following the slave’s rules and regulations.
Conclusion
In Galatians 2.15-4.31, Paul outlines what the Jew by nature should have known about the Gospel and Law. Knowing this much, as pointed out in the above essay, they should also have seen that the Old Testament pointed beyond the Law and to fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham. The fulfilment in Christ of all these Old Testament texts makes the texts come alive to the reader, so to speak. It was not just theological reflection. Fulfilment had recently come, in history, in the lifetime of the Galatians, in the heir to Abraham, in Jesus Christ. In faith in Him, not through works of the Law, we find that same faith of Abraham that God accounted as righteousness. We can see what the Old Testament was pointing to. What was only promise is now fulfilment.
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