I took a sentence of this Epistle as the starting-point of my remarks upon St. Paul; it seemed so remarkably to declare the object of his life as well as of his writings. Of course I must look upon that sentence as denoting the object of the letter in which it occurs. But I do not wish to force that observation upon the reader. I hope it will impress itself upon him without any effort, when he considers the relation in which the Apostle was standing to his Galatian converts.
There is little difference of opinion about the objects of the teachers who had sought to turn this Church from St. Paul’s doctrines, or about the kind of influence which they exerted. That they were Judaizing Christians; that they endeavored to set up the Apostles of the Circumcision against the Apostles of the Gentiles—representing him to be not an Apostle at all, but one who had derived his wisdom from the original twelve, and had perverted what he had learnt; that they maintained the privileges of those who were circumcised to be immeasurably greater than the privileges of those who were merely baptized even if the latter could be counted in a safe condition; that the Galatians who had received St. Paul with passionate fervor, listened to these insinuations against him, and began to suspect that he had deceived them about their own position; this is generally admitted, and is obvious to any reader of the letter.
In the opening assertion that he was an Apostle not of men, or by man, he joins issue with the teachers who had spoken of those whom Christ had called while on earth, as his masters and as possessing a title to obedience which he could never claim. Much more was involved in this objection than a mere personal slander. The heresy that Christ was a great and divine Prophet during the thirty-three years that he stayed on earth, but those years were not the manifestation of One who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, was involved in it. Christ had exhausted his power of designating Apostles; He was not really ruling His Church after He ascended. St. Paul’s calling was the practical answer to this denial, in which the whole Gospel was involved; therefore he insists upon it; heedless, as in the case of the Corinthians, whether he was called arrogant and self-exalting or not.
The first two chapters are mainly occupied in explaining his relation to the Apostles of the circumcision. But he gives the Galatians at once to understand that he enters upon this subject because the very existence of their faith was in hazard. These new doctors were not hurting his reputation, or substituting another mode of teaching for his. They were utterly undermining the New Testament dispensation; they were preaching another Gospel—which was not another, which was no Gospel. He keeps no terms with them; he denounces and anathematizes them as robbers of the Gentiles and of mankind. They were practising the easiest and oldest of tricks with the old success, persuading their hearers that bondage was a safer state than freedom. There was no way to deal with such men but to tell them that whatever they might pretend, however religious they might be, they were denying Christ who came to set men free.
He reminds them of his own vehement addiction to Jewish traditions. He had known what these were, better than any of those who were now exalting them. Only because it pleased God to reveal His Son in him did he escape from them, or find that he had a message which he must deliver to all men. He had not to learn what it was from Peter or John or any one else. After three years indeed in Arabia, he came up to Jerusalem and stayed fifteen days with Peter, seeing also James the brother of the Lord. But he had no further communication with the churches of Judæa for fourteen years. Then, when he had been engaged in his mission to the Gentiles with Barnabas, they went up to Jerusalem; they went by revelation, and they desired an additional witness that they were not running in vain or laboring in vain. But they submitted to no dictation. They did not allow Titus, who was a Greek, to be circumcised, however much some, perhaps even the Apostles, might have desired it in deference to the prejudices of false brethren who wished to rob them of their liberty. To such he would yield place, no not for an hour. And ultimately, he says, those who seemed to be the pillars of the Church imposed no new restraints upon them, but gave them the right hand of fellowship, treating their work as a distinct one from their own, though urging them (not unwilling) to remember their poor countrymen.
So far he had proved that the Apostles of Jerusalem were not his lawgivers or judges. At Antioch he went further. He rebuked Peter to the face, because at first he had eaten freely with Gentiles; afterward when certain came down from James he had stood aloof from them, setting an example to the other Jews, and even drawing Barnabas after him. This conduct Paul rebuked as contrary to the truth of the Gospel. He said to Peter before them all, “If thou, being a Jew, livest as a Gentile, by what right dost thou force the Gentile to Judaize?” According to Lachmann’s arrangement of the sentences, this is all that he said at that time; what follows belongs to the Epistle.
I cannot but think the old division is the right one. The words quoted could not have been intelligible to Peter and the Jews without those which succeed them. It might easily be said, “No doubt you who call yourself an Apostle of the Gentiles have a great interest in maintaining their equality with the Jews; Peter, as an Apostle of the Circumcision, is equally bound to assert the difference between them.” I conceive that Paul desired to show Peter that he, though an Apostle of the circumcision, was as much bound to maintain this principle, was as inconsistent in not maintaining it, as he himself would have been. There were points, they had agreed, in which it behoved them to take one course and him another. He desires to make it clear that this was not one of those cases; that Peter could not maintain the truth which they held in common, if, in deference to the prejudices of any men whatsoever, he disclaimed complete brotherly fellowship with the Gentiles.
Here is his argument. “We Jews by nature, and not sinners out of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith of Jesus Christ, we too have believed on Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law; because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” As if he had said, “You are a Jew, are you not? You have not the disadvantage of these Gentiles; you are not a sinner because you belong to them. And yet you have believed in Christ, you have felt that you were a just and righteous man only in virtue of your belief in Him, that you were not a righteous or justified man in virtue of any thing that you did as a Jew, of any thing that distinguished you from the Gentiles.” “But if,” he goes on, “we, seeking to be justified in Christ, have been found also ourselves sinners,”—“if by seeking this righteousness we have confessed that we are sinners as much as those who were not in our covenant, who had not our law,—do we thereby make Christ the servant of sin?” For this, no doubt, was the kind of reasoning which the Judaizing Christians used. They said, “In lowering ourselves to the level of the Gentiles, we are lowering our Master; we are acting as if He merely came as a minister of Gentile sinners, not to deliver holy Israel.” “But is it so?” St. Paul asks. “No verily. I constitute myself a transgressor by seeking to build up again those things which I had thrown down. No doubt I, Jew as I am, am a sinner in myself. The Jewish law tells me I am; nay tells me that I am dead. I am dead in myself that I might live to God. I am crucified with Christ. I live, not I, but Christ lives in me; and that which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of God and of Christ who has loved me, and has given Himself for me. I will not make void the grace of God. If through the law is righteousness, then hath Christ died in vain.”
It is a great cause of exultation to Bauer and his school, that St. Paul should have set himself thus passionately in opposition to the Jerusalem doctors, and should have shown the chief of them how near he was to that doctrine which afterwards was called Ebionitic. But if I wanted to curb the steed and check the pride of these neologians, this is the very passage on which I should most dwell. Does St. Paul set up his theory of the Gospel against that of the other Apostles, his doctrine of Justification against their doctrine of Works, his belief in Christ against their belief in the Law? Does not the whole force of his argument turn upon this; that he is convicting Peter of an act of temporary treason against his own faith, his own convictions, his own habitual professions? Would not the whole of this famous speech be a silly waste of words if it did not show what the faith of a Jew, of a circumcised man, of an Apostle of the Circumcision, must be, in order that he might justify his trust in Christ to his own heart and to his countrymen, supposing there were not a Gentile in the world? If Peter had one Gospel and Paul another, the former was not to be blamed for the course he took; there was nothing insincere or wrong in it. If, on the other hand, the peculiar position of himself and of James, the strong obligation which was laid upon them of showing how great the privileges of the Jew were, exposed them to a particular kind of temptation, into which temptation Peter on this occasion fell,—and in the city where it was likely to be most mischievous, doing thereby as much harm to his own countrymen as to the Gentiles, how desirable was it that such a testimony as this should be borne to the truth of the Gospel for which they were both equally pledged to live and die.
The Apostle, as usual, has done a great deal of work in a very short space. Whilst appearing only to defend his own title against those who were disparaging it, he has really entered into the very heart of the subject; he has torn to pieces the new Gospel of these Judaizers, as well as taken from them the authority upon which they pretended to rest it. And now then he can turn to their victims. Not, however, that there is any real chasm between the address he made to Peter at Antioch and that which he makes here to the foolish Galatians. There he had said that he was dead with Christ, that he lived by Him; here he asks who had enchanted them before whose eyes Christ Jesus had been set forth crucified. I do not ask whether the words “in you” ought to stand or to be thrown out. I rest nothing upon them. I only ask that we should take the previous passage together with the sixth and seventh chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, to explain why he speaks in this place of Christ being crucified. If he had not preached to the Galatians that they were crucified with Christ, that Christ lived in them, there would seem no reason for such language, nor would it stand in any evident connection with what follows. He asks them whether they received the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith. He surely intimates that the gift of the Spirit was the great sign that the Christ had come, and that the New Testament covenant had displaced the Old. Had this then, the highest and most perfect gift of all, been bestowed because they had done some great acts to deserve it, or because they trusted God as a Father to give good gifts to His children? He stops for a moment to ask whether they really think that there can be any greater blessing than this, whether outward fleshly gifts can make them more complete than this spiritual one. And then he proceeds to argue with the Judaizers entirely upon their own ground. It is the covenant with Abraham they prize so highly. What is that covenant? Its ground is belief in God, its personal fruit is righteousness, its full expression is, “In thee shall all the nations be blessed.” If you want to be blessed with Abraham, you must believe in God as he did. But you are not content with that; you want to be under the law. That is, you want not to be under a blessing, but under a curse. The law is ratified by a curse. Those who had the law did not want to be under it; for the Prophet said, “the just man shall live by faith.” The law is not of faith. Its formulary is, “he that doeth these things shall live by them.” Christ enduring the accursed cross, redeemed us from that death which is the law’s curse, the death which is upon all men alike; that so in Him the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles as well as the Jews, that “we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”
The Epistle to the Romans has prepared us for this kind of argument; but it is put here more sharply and epigrammatically, more suitably to the character of the Galatian people. The contrast between the blessing of the covenant and the curse of the law would startle them by its evident truth, however little they might have thought of it before. Of the same character are the remarks which follow. A human covenant would not be set aside or disannulled by him who made it. The promises to Abraham and to his seed were made by God Himself. Would God’s law set those aside? And mark the words of the promise. It is to Abraham and his seed, not to his seeds. It may be thought that here St. Paul is playing with words, accommodating himself to the temper either of the Rabbinical teachers, or of the lively superficial people who had been misled by them. I do not deny that he was acquainted with the habits of both, and that he availed himself of his knowledge. But if he does, it is not for the purpose of confirming the disease, but of curing it. The difference which he points out between seeds and seed is a radical one. It catches the ear. But the further you look into it the more important it becomes. As in the Epistle to the Romans he had so successfully turned the prejudice of the Israelite against the Ishmaelite and the Edomite to their confutation, showing that the calling of Isaac and Jacob were signs that the covenant was not a fleshly one, as they were making it out to be when they were seeking to exclude the Gentiles; so here he dwells upon the fact that it was not the different seeds of Abraham but the one seed to whom the promise was made, as a witness that there was one person contemplated in the scheme of God, as He in whom all the families of the earth were to have a blessing. If, then,—his argument is,—the Jew claims a blessing as a descendant of Abraham, he must first of all claim it simply as a blessing; secondly, he must claim it through a person, the Mediator of it; thirdly, he must claim it as one of indefinite and universal extent.
But what, then, is the meaning of the Law if it stands out thus in opposition to the Covenant and the Promise? He answers, “It was added, because of transgressions.” It presumes wrongdoing, the separation of those to whom it is sent from Him who has chosen them and revealed Himself to them. The law he describes as serving this purpose till the seed should come to whom the promise was made. It was ordained, he says, through angels, but it was in the hand of a Mediator. He adds, “Now a Mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? No, verily. If a law had been given that could impart life, truly righteousness would have been by law. But the Scripture has concluded all things under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.” This doctrine of Law as administered by angels, has a very important bearing upon the New Testament revelation. It forms a link between this Epistle and that to the Hebrews. There the new dispensation is spoken of as the dispensation of a Son, in contrast with the old as a dispensation by Angels. At the same time it is shown that a Son was pointed at and implied in every part of Jewish history and prophecy. Here the subject is contemplated less generally, and from a somewhat different point of view. The promises of God are said all to point to a certain seed; the law is said to be given through angels or messengers, yet with continual reference to a Mediator in whom the law is accomplished, in whom God and man are united. The law expresses the separation between them. Herein lies its curse. The covenant expresses the union between man and God. Herein consists its blessing. But the blessing can only be realized, the curse can only be taken away, when He who is at once the Seed and the Mediator is manifested. The law implies that there are two parties who must be reconciled. But though there are these two parties, since God is one, since He is always the same, how can His law and His promises be contrary to each other? They cannot be contrary. Their object as well as their source must be the same. Law proclaims righteousness. Had it the power it would make men righteous. But it has not the power; it never can give life. The Scripture, or perhaps more properly the written letter used as an equivalent for the law, hath shut up all things under sin, that the promise of righteousness and life might be given to those who have faith in Christ. Language very similar to this I have considered at large while commenting upon the Epistle to the Romans. To that Epistle we must turn for the full explanation of the law of sin and of righteousness, of the truth that the flesh is convicted of having no good thing in itself, that righteousness comes from Christ upon all who believe. What we have to take notice of here is the particular phraseology “shut up,” kept in garrison under law, with a view to the faith which was afterwards to be revealed. What the Judaizing teachers had said to the Galatians was, that the old covenant and law put men into a more perfect state than the new baptism. That was good as far as it went; it was a preliminary. But if they would stand on a high ground they must add the Judaical rite. His great object therefore is to reverse this order, to show that the old must have been the preliminary, that law and covenant both implied something as existing which had not yet been declared. This state, which the silly Galatians were imagining as one of special elevation, was, in fact, in its very nature elementary. The law was the pedagogue leading men to Christ, that they might be made righteous by faith in Him. But now that faith had come, now that the object of faith had been revealed, they were not subject to this schoolmaster. “For ye are all sons of God through the faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to promise.” This is the conclusion to which he has been bringing us from the first. Sonship to God is the highest state of all. Every thing in the old dispensation has been hinting at that, looking forward to the time when Jews—when men—should be able to claim it. The time is come. You Gentiles have been baptized into Christ, you have put on Christ, you have claimed in Him the state of Sonship. What more do you want? Is it to be heirs of Abraham’s blessing? You are that already. This is the inheritance.
Then comes that remarkable passage, so all important for the understanding of St. Paul, in which he affirms that men did not begin to be sons of God when they were declared sons of God, that their previous discipline and education implied that this was their character, just as the Roman act of emancipation did not cause those to be children who had not been so already, but recognized and affirmed them to be children, and put them in possession of the rights belonging to that relation. What is specially to be observed is, that the Apostle draws no distinction in this respect between Jews and Gentiles. We might have concluded that the Jews, the chosen people of God, were children under education, treated as servants up to the hour of emancipation. But here, as everywhere, St. Paul is a leveller. We, he says, while we were infants were in servitude under the elements of the world; you that did not know God were in servitude to those that by nature are not Gods. He does not of course confound the Jew with the Gentile; he does not undervalue the deliverance from idolatry; but he describes one as well as the other as being children under servitude, one as well as the other as being subjected to elements of the world, in order that they might be trained for that fulness of the time when Christ, made of a woman, made under the law, should redeem those who were under the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons, and when, because they were sons, He should send forth the Spirit of His Son into their hearts, crying Abba, Father.
He considers then their adherence to these Judaizing teachers as nothing less than a relapse into idolatry. He had delivered them from it only by preaching that the unseen God had sent forth His Son to claim them from the service of outward visible things, and adopt them into His family. If they were not adopted into His family, if they were to become servants of visible things, in order that they might attain a more perfect state, it did not signify what they called themselves; they were separating themselves from the God of Abraham and doing homage to those against whom law and prophets had borne witness. This was a startling charge for those to hear who fancied themselves ultra-Jews, and who professed to raise the Gentiles to their level. But it is in perfect consistency with all St. Paul’s teaching. Jews, he saw, must become idolaters, the worst kind of idolaters, unless they preached a Gospel of deliverance to idolaters which was equally a Gospel for themselves.
It is this conviction which comes out so strongly in the verses from the 11th to 21st of the 4th chapter. He is afraid for the Galatians lest he should have labored among them in vain. It is not that they have done him any wrong. All he wants is that they should share the blessing which belongs to them as much as to him. They knew very well that he came to them in weakness. There was something in his circumstances, apparently, on his first visit which was especially humiliating. Yet it did not interfere with their receiving him as an angel of God, as if Christ Himself had come among them. At that time they would have dug out their eyes to give to him. They were wonderfully zealous; and zeal is an excellent thing if it is in a good cause, and if it does not spend itself in mere love to those who are present. But there is a zeal which is not at all excellent. There are those who show a great deal of zeal in robbing their disciples of that which is most precious, in order that they may depend upon them and admire them. It is not that kind of affection which St. Paul would cultivate towards his disciples, or would win from them. Yet he does feel for them a mother’s love and a mother’s pangs. He travails again in birth for them until Christ be formed in them. For this is what he desires for them, not something foreign and external to themselves. While they are seeking mere externals he must be in doubt of them, nay, he must come to them again with a changed and sterner voice.
After this utterance of personal feeling which belongs just as much to the object and essence of the Epistle, as passages of a similar kind did in the Epistle to the Corinthians, he returns again to his old line of argument. He still uses the argumentum ad hominem, he still takes up the tone of thought which was familiar to the Jews, divesting it of its triviality, bringing out the truth which was latent in it. You wish to be under law,—that is under the Old Testament economy. Let us hear then what we are told in the books which expound that economy to us. Consider the story of Hagar and Sarah, of Isaac and Ishmael. Your teachers are in the habit of dwelling upon it and deducing all sorts of fanciful meanings from it. I admit that it has a meaning. What is it? The child of the flesh was the child of Hagar; the child of the promise was the child of Sarah. Sarah was a freewoman, Hagar was a bondslave. I have called you to be children of the promise, children of God’s covenant: they want you to be children of bondage, servants of the law that was proclaimed on Sinai. I grant you they would connect you with Jerusalem; but it is not with God’s Jerusalem, with the divine, free, heavenly city. It is with a fleshly, earthly, slavish city, which is in bondage with all her children. I call you to be citizens of that city,—children of that mother of whom the prophet speaks as the true Sarah that was barren and did not bring forth, and yet was to have many more children than the other. I know that if you claim this liberty and this citizenship, you will endure persecution and suffering from those who are content with fleshly bondage. But the divine word has gone forth, “Cast out the bondwoman and her children; for the children of the bondwoman shall not be heirs with the children of the free.” A strangely new moral of the story it must have seemed to the Rabbis, one that had never occurred to them amidst all the multitude of allegories they were in the habit of spinning. But it carried its own evidence with it. It was no mere pretty application of a story. It was the detection in one particular case of a divine law which might be traced through every fact of the divine history.
Freedom is held out to man as the effect of all God’s dealings with him. Christ had fulfilled the law in working out freedom for men. In His freedom they were to stand fast. To stoop to bondage was to renounce Him. To be circumcised was to say that He had not redeemed them. It was to lay themselves under the obligation of doing the whole law; it was to fall from grace. “For we in spirit by faith receive the hope of righteousness.” This is our reward, this is our expectation, to know God’s righteousness and to be partakers of it. If we are united to Christ, if we are made sons of God in Him, then we have this reward; for in Him neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but faith energizing through love. That is, to speak plainly, there would be no faith working through love, there would be no aspiring after righteousness in those who supposed that circumcision was to save them or to perfect them; they would not understand what they were saved from, they would have no dream of what perfection consists in. The Apostle therefore does not disguise that he is alarmed for them. He trusts that the leaven was not gone into their hearts; but a little leaven may leaven the whole lump. Whoever it is who has troubled them with this new Gospel about circumcision, will bear his burden. It was a very easy doctrine to preach. A great deal of persecution among men might be avoided by it; but he trusted that God would cut off those who troubled them.
The hint which he has given about the moral effects of liberty and slavery, is followed out through the rest of the Epistle. What did his opponents suppose that he meant by liberty? Did they think that he meant the liberty of the flesh, the liberty of each man to please himself? No, but it was the liberty of yielding to God’s Spirit, the liberty to serve one another in love. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” was the great law of liberty: the right to bite and devour one another was a very miserable right indeed. There were two powers contending for them. The flesh was lusting against the Spirit, the Spirit against the flesh; so that they did not do the things which they would, either all the good or all the evil which they intended. But if they submitted to be led by the spirit, they would not fulfil the lusts of the flesh, and they would not be under the yoke of law. For law exists to condemn the acts of the flesh, and the fruits of the Spirit are those against which there is no law. As he had already declared, the privilege of those who belonged to Christ is, that they are crucified with him; they have renounced the flesh and the lusts which are their own; they have claimed the righteousness and life which are in Him.
I have noticed elsewhere the memorable coincidence which there is between this passage in the Epistle which is supposed to be the most Pauline, the most anti-Jacobite, and the Epistle of St. James. And the coincidence is expressly in the assertion of liberty. The regal law of St. James is the law of liberty in the Epistle to the Galatians. Upon the assertion that the Son of God has come that we might have power to be spiritual creatures, and to carry out God’s will in the spirit, both teachers insist equally. And both apply it to the confutation of Jewish vanity and pharisaism. Only the work of St. James was to confute the Pharisee, by showing him what the ceremonial of his law meant, how it might be learned and fulfilled by one who regarded the true service of God as consisting in visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction; whereas the work of St. Paul was to show what foundation had been laid for a spiritual and universal economy after the Jewish ceremonial and polity should have crumbled. In pursuance of that object, the last part of the Epistle is occupied in pointing out what sympathy and fellowship the members of the church would have with each other, what capacity of restoring those who had fallen, what distrust of themselves, what readiness to bear the burdens of one another and to endure their own, what a communication of blessings there would be between the teacher and the taught, what an unfainting zeal in doing good, what hope of a harvest of eternal life, if they sowed to the Spirit; and what poor and miserable results if they sowed to the flesh, even if they had ever so much zeal about circumcision and law. That zeal, when it took the form of forcing a bondage upon the Gentiles, was fleshly in the simplest sense; it was a rebellion against the cross of Christ, in which alone the Apostle desired to glory, by which the world was crucified to him and he to the world. In Christ Jesus there was a new creation; circumcision and uncircumcision were at an end. To all who would walk according to that rule he wished mercy and peace, and to the Israel of God.