Galatians 3:23-29 Commentary

Some advertisements thrive on presenting various “before-and-after” scenarios. Diet pills and plans like to place side by side pictures of people who were overweight before they went on their regimen but looked healthier after they completed it. Remodelers and others also employ pictures of kitchens before and after they did their work in order to showcase its quality.

The New Testament scholar N.T. Wright (Galatians, Eerdmans, 2021) to whom I’m indebted for some of this commentary’s ideas, calls this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson is a “before-and-after” picture. It sketches, first, how things were earlier for Jewish people, and, second, how they now are for people who are Jewish who believe Jesus is the Messiah.

In verse 23-24 Paul says, “Before [Pro*] this coming [elthein] of faith [pistin], we were held in custody [ephrourometha] under the law [nomon], locked up [synkleomenoi] until the faith [pistin] that was to come [mellousan] would be revealed [apokalyphthenai]. The law was our guardian [paidogogos] until Christ came that we might be justified [dikaiothomen] by faith [pisteos].”

Verse 23’s “before this coming,” of course, links it to the apostle’s somewhat complex discussion of the law that preceded this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson. In verse 19 he remembers how God gave the law to rein in human sinfulness. In other words, before the Spirit graciously implanted faith in all of God’s dearly beloved people, God’s law served to lock us up.

It’s not easy to fully understand just what role the apostle is saying God’s law played in the lives of God’s people before Christ’s coming. His primary reference is certainly to God’s Jewish people – though we might argue that at least the principle extends to gentiles as well. We sense that Paul sees the law before Christ’s coming as a kind of “protective custody” for Jews and non-Jews alike.

It reminded God’s people, on the one hand of some of our most destructive impulses –to worship other gods, work without resting and dishonor our parents. But God’s law also serves to at least try to protect our neighbors, in part by calling us to be truthful with them and be faithful in marriage. That law even carried with it curses that fell on those who failed to love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves.

But, of course, that law had (and still has) severe limitations. Because it can’t soften hearts to God’s ways, it can’t fully restrain God’s people from living out our most dangerous impulses. God’s law can’t force anyone to love God more than anything and our neighbor as much as ourselves.

Each time my wife and I visit our grandchildren we’re reminded of the law’s limitations. We live just off the United States’ I-95, among the busiest highways in all of North America. Its speed limit is clearly posted along every stretch of it. Engineers designed those limits to protect all drivers along that busy interstate. But some drivers treat that law as little more than a suggestion. They routinely and aggressively break the speed limit. In breaking the law that is the speed limit, those drivers endanger both themselves and their neighbor-drivers.

Paul basically admits that God’s law has similar limitations. God designed it to restrain some of our baser impulses. But finally both our well-being and our acceptance by God depends on something entirely other than our obedience of God’s law. “The law [nomos] was,” the apostle writes in verse 24, “our guardian [paidogogos] until Christ came that we might be justified [dikaiothomen] by faith [pisteos].” Because we can’t keep the law well enough to earn God’s acceptance of us, we needed Someone Else to perfectly keep that law for us. We needed, quite simply, Jesus the Christ.

Because of God’s grace that we receive with our faith, we no longer need God’s law to be our guardian. That law still reminds us of both our need for God’s grace and the best way to faithfully respond to that grace. Now, however, “In Christ Jesus” we “are all [pantes] children [huoi] of God through faith.” Jesus’ friends are no longer what we once called “wards,” under the custody of someone but not legally children of anyone. Those who receive God’s grace with our faith are, instead, God’s adopted children.

In verse 27 Paul goes on to link that status to our baptism. There are, of course, a variety of interpretations of that link. Preachers will want to proclaim it through the lense and in light of our own traditions. But perhaps all of Jesus’ friends can say at least this: God graciously connects those who are baptized to our Elder Brother, Jesus Christ. People who are baptized in the name of the Triune God are not anything or one’s “wards.” We are, by God’s amazing grace, God’s adopted children and Jesus’ adopted siblings.

God, in fact, clothes those who receive God’s grace with our faith in Jesus Christ “with Christ.” While this is another complex idea, Paul seems to mean at least this: when God looks at God’s adopted children, God sees not our sinfulness, but the righteousness of Jesus Christ. As a result, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ friends seek to imitate Jesus Christ in what we do, say and even think.

Yet we’re never alone in either that status or remodeling project. In verse 28 Paul sings, “There is neither Jew [Ioudaios] nor Gentile [Hellen], neither slave [doulos] nor free [eleutheros], nor is there male [arsen] and female [thely].”

Preachers may want to note a couple of things about this familiar passage. Paul is not claiming that Christians who fit in these various categories are exactly the same. We remain shaped by many if not all of those statuses. But the apostle is insisting that since God doesn’t view and treat people any differently on the basis of those statuses, God’s dearly beloved people don’t either. No matter our ethnicity, gender or social status, we view and treat each person as first of all bearers of God’s image whom God deeply loves.

In fact, it’s as if Paul insists that what distinguishes Jesus’ followers from each other is far, far less important than what unites us. Whether Christians are Jews or Gentiles, men or women, slaves or “freedmen,” we are equal in both our desperate need for God’s amazing grace and in our faithful reception of God’s grace. Jesus’ followers aren’t just God’s adopted children and Jesus’ adopted siblings. We’re also each other’s adopted siblings. We are brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.

So while Jesus’ followers belong to various ethnic, gender or socio-economic “groups,” we first, last (and everywhere in between) “belong to Christ.” God’s dearly beloved people are not our own, but Christ’s own. No matter what labels we attach to ourselves or others attach to us, we are what Paul calls “Abraham’s seed [sperma], and heirs [kleronomai] according to [kat’] the promise [epangelian]” (29).

There are not, in other words, two families of believers, Jewish and non-Jewish, or male and female, or slave and free. In this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson, as well as throughout his communications with the early Church, the apostle insists Jesus’ friends are members of one family. All those who faithfully receive God’s grace are Abraham’s descendants, God’s adopted children and Jesus’ adopted siblings.

This truth, however, is far easier to proclaim and even believe than actually live out. While Christ prayed with almost his last breath that all Christians would be one, there are an estimated 45,000 Christian denominations worldwide and 200 Christian denominations in the United States alone. What’s more, while Paul insists that all Christians are members of God’s family, there seem to be countless groups of North American churches that are too loosely allied to be considered denominations. The United States also has almost countless churches that consider themselves to be independent.

But Galatians 3’s proclaimers might not be most discouraged about such trends. We might be even more discouraged by the widespread indifference among Jesus’ followers about such fragmentation. N.T. Wright writes, “It seems to me obvious that Paul would not only be shocked at our disunity; he would not be able to comprehend that we don’t care about it. He would simply not be able to grasp how people who have read and preached Romans and Galatians and the rest for hundreds of years could collude with rampant disunity.”

No preacher is likely to heal that disunity with one message or even series of messages. But we might consider letting the Holy Spirit prompt us to explore how we might live out our unity in Christ with God’s “family members” with whom we may not yet feel fully comfortable worshiping. We might let the Spirit help us explore and emphasize the essentials of the Christian faith. One way to do that might be for all of God’s adopted children to regularly recite one of the ecumenical creeds or pray the Lord’s Prayer.

But perhaps more than anything, Paul may be summoning Jesus’ 21^st century followers to a kind of holy discontentment with the fragmented status quo. We might look for ways to inspire a kind of holy restlessness within our hearers about our failures to live out the unity for which Jesus prayed and Paul so earnestly pleaded. Then by God’s grace through the power of the Holy Spirit, the “before” might actually look less like the “after” that the apostle so passionately described.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

In his bestseller, Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe writes about a Jewish mayor of a large American city who “found the Christian churches baffling. When he was growing up, the goyim were all Catholics, unless you counted the shvartzer, which nobody did. They didn’t even rate being called goyim. The Catholics were two types, the Irish and the Italians . . .

“He was in college before he realized there was this whole other set of goyim, the Protestants. He never saw any . . . The Protestants were split up into such a crazy bunch of sects nobody could even keep track of them all. It was all very pagan and spooky, when it wasn’t ridiculous. They were all worshipping some obscure Jew from halfway around the world.”