Galatians 2:15–21
15 We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16 yet we know that a person is not justified1 by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
17 But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! 18 For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. 19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 20 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. 21 I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness2 were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.
1 Or counted righteous (three times in verse 16); also verse 17 2 Or justification
Section Overview: The Essence of the Gospel
This section (Gal. 2:15–21) forms a bridge between Paul’s case for the independence of his apostleship from the Jerusalem apostles (1:11–2:14) and his defense of the “truth of the gospel” against the false teachers in Galatia (2:15–6:10). The passage itself seems to be a theological summary of what Paul said to Cephas in Antioch when he “opposed him to his face” (2:11), but it also lays the groundwork for Paul’s defense of the gospel in Galatia.
Paul argues that all people, whether Jews or Gentiles, are so sinful that it is impossible to gain life by keeping God’s law. This point is not at odds with the Jewish Scriptures but is actually something that every Jew should know through those Scriptures. As a result, Jewish and Gentile Christians are united in their common need of God’s grace through the loving, self-giving death of Christ. To rebuild the wall of hostility between the two groups transgresses this good news.
Section Outline
III. Paul Defends the Gospel in Galatia (2:15–6:10)
A. The Essence of the Gospel (2:15–21)
Response
The gospel is good news because it reveals that our gracious and merciful Creator has taken on himself the burden of pardoning our rebellion against him, rescuing us from the results of that rebellion, and giving us life as he designed us to live it. A crucial step in appropriating these truths and beginning to walk the path to life is the recognition that everyone who has not started to experience the transforming effects of the gospel is in a state of rebellion against God. No particular group, however virtuous in other ways, is exempt from this verdict. When the biblical scholars of Jesus’ time criticized him for “eating with sinners and tax collectors,” he responded that he “came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:16–17). All who respond to Jesus’ call to follow him must begin with the realization that they are not righteous but sinners. Humanity is united by its need of rescue from sin through Jesus’ redeeming death and by its need of a transforming, life-giving relationship with him.
To place ethnic customs, religious rituals, particular rules, or anything else alongside these central truths of the gospel, as if they too are necessary for a right relationship with God, is to “nullify the grace of God” entirely (Gal. 2:21). Mixing these extra elements with the gospel and then making them necessary for Christian fellowship not only diminishes the central place of Christ’s death in the gospel but also drives people deeper into transgression. The unselfish, loving action of Christ in his death leads believers to loving unity with one another, not to rebuilding the walls of enmity and division.
Or counted righteous (three times in verse 16); also verse 17
Or justification
2:15 Paul’s expression “we . . . Jews” implies that he continues to describe what he said to Cephas in public during the Antioch conflict. The lack of quotation marks in the ESV, however, correctly indicates that Paul is not quoting himself verbatim. This is a summary, and it begins by adopting the viewpoint that non-Jewish people were sinners in a special sense, a viewpoint Cephas’s actions implied and other Jews, including the people from James, held. The second-century-BC book of Jubilees, for example, gives these instructions to Jews:
2:16 The verb “justify” (Gk. dikaioō), which appears three times in this verse and frequently throughout the rest of Galatians (2:17; 3:8, 11, 24; 5:4), was often used in legal contexts, meaning to “set right, deem right, do a person right” (cf. LSJ). In nonbiblical Greek it could mean simply to render judgment or to hand down justice in the sense of punishing someone. In the Septuagint, however, it often appears in a positive judicial sense, meaning to “acquit, exonerate from punishment.” Honest judges, for example, should “not justify the impious for the sake of a gift” (Ex. 23:7 LXX) but should “justify the just [ton dikaion] and condemn the impious” (Deut. 25:1 LXX).
Here Paul argues that if the judge is God and the criterion for judgment is doing what the law requires (“works of the law”), then every Jew should know that it is not possible for God to declare people “just” and release them from punishment on this basis. They should know this because Scripture itself testifies to it. Paul alludes to Psalm 143:2, “Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous [LXX: “will be justified,” dikaiōthēsetai] before you.” The psalmist, a Jew, knew that no one could really stand up under scrutiny in God’s law court. All Jews should know, then, that in order to survive judgment day, it is necessary to take refuge in God’s grace and mercy, and Christian Jews know that God has offered this grace and mercy in Christ’s redemptive, atoning death on the cross.
2:17 If all of this is true, then it is clear that the difference between Gentiles and Jews is not that one group sins and the other does not sin. “We too,” that is, “we” Jews, are “found” by the truth of the gospel to be sinners. Paul’s denial that this critical implication of the gospel implicates Christ in promoting sin probably responds to the accusation that Paul’s teaching on God’s justification of the impious encourages people to sin (Rom. 3:8; 6:1, 15; cf. Gal. 5:13).
2:18 Rather, someone who builds up walls they once tore down is a transgressor. Paul probably speaks metaphorically here of the misuse of the Mosaic law as a “dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:14). The dietary commandments could be described as “unbroken palisades and iron walls to prevent our mixing with any of the other peoples in any matter, being thus kept pure in body and soul” (Letter of Aristeas 139). Rebuilding these walls was precisely what Cephas and those he led astray in Antioch were doing, and this, not eating with fellow believers who happen to be Gentiles, makes one a transgressor.
2:19–20 In verse 18, Paul had used the first person (“I”) hypothetically (“if”) to describe a principle that was true of everyone. Here, without the “if,” the autobiographical nature of what he says seems more definite, but he still articulates a principle applicable to everyone, particularly to those believers in Galatia pondering whether to adopt observance of the Mosaic law.
Paul ties the law to death in 3:10–13. There he argues that at his crucifixion (“hanged on a tree”; 3:13), Christ received the curse that the law pronounces on all who fail to do everything in it. Through this substitutionary death, however, Christ redeemed believers from the curse they deserved. Here Paul’s point goes slightly further. When he became a believer, he not only escaped the law’s curse of death on the disobedient (Deut. 28:15–68; 30:15, 17–18) but also received the law’s blessing of life on the obedient (Deut. 28:1–14; 30:15–16, 19–20). The Mosaic law, however, no longer had control over this life. This is why Paul speaks of dying “to the law,” rather than merely dying “under” the law, and it is also why to adopt, for example, the Mosaic law of circumcision after dying to the law is a form of enslavement (Gal. 2:4).
Here Paul also speaks of his relationship to Christ’s death as more than simply rescue from the law’s curse by means of Christ’s substitutionary atonement. In some sense he died with Christ on the cross, but this was a death that led to a new life, one in which Christ was the central factor of his existence. Paul is speaking here of the dramatic transformation in his life that occurred when God turned him from persecuting the church to preaching the faith (1:13, 23). His commitment to the law was probably the basis for his persecution of the church, just as it was the basis for much Jewish rejection of Christ (Rom. 9:32–33), but now Christ, rather than the law, is the focus of his life.
The believers in Galatia, like the transformed Paul, now have Christ at the center of their existence rather than their own pre-Christian concerns, including their old religious traditions (Gal. 4:8–10), and yet they now seem to be making the same journey Paul made, only in reverse. They are going back to a life in which Christ and his loving, self-giving death is not central (4:9).
2:21 To set Christ’s death alongside observance of the Mosaic law as one of two necessary elements for acceptance with God is to set Christ’s death aside entirely. Christ’s life within the believer entails the death of all non-Christian, self-motivated forms of relating to God and seeking life. If observance of the Mosaic law, or pagan religious customs (4:8–9), could provide peace with God and life, then Christ’s atoning death was unnecessary.