3:6 Although grammatically this clause is actually part of the preceding rhetorical question, it begins a new section of the letter’s argument. This becomes clear from the reference to Abraham, who will dominate the argument through verse 29.

Paul wants to show that although the Galatians’ conversion happened apart from works of the Mosaic law, it did not happen in a way contrary to Scripture. Rather, their entry into God’s people through faith was the fulfillment of God’s promises to the most important patriarch of the Jewish people, Abraham.

Paul begins by asserting that the faith of the Galatians was qualitatively the same (“just as”) the faith of Abraham in Genesis 15:6. In its original context, Paul’s citation describes Abram’s trust that God would do what seemed impossible and fulfill his promise to Abram of countless offspring. The word “count” (Gk. logizomai) is a mathematical term that refers to taking one value as equal to another, of crediting one thing as another. Typically, people counted righteous deeds as righteousness (cf. 1 Macc. 2:52), but here God simply counts Abram’s reliance on God’s faithfulness as righteousness.

We might wonder whether God considered Abram’s faith as a righteous deed and thus reckoned him righteous. But Paul has just insisted that faith is not a work (Gal. 3:2, 5; cf. Rom. 3:27; 4:2, 6; 9:32). God credited Abram with righteousness, then, not because he did the right thing but as a gift.

3:7 It makes sense (“then”) that if God justified Abraham by faith alone, he would also justify others by faith alone, but exactly why all those justified by faith would be sons of Abraham is less clear. Paul will explain his reasoning in verses 8–9, but a hint of what he is thinking is seen in his replacement of the name “Abram” in the text of Genesis 15:6 with the name “Abraham,” which God gives to Abram in Genesis 17:5. There, God says that he makes the change because he will make Abram “the father of a multitude of nations,” and as the ESV footnote at Genesis 17:5 says, “Abraham means father of a multitude.” The name “Abraham” already hints, therefore, that God would fulfill his promise to Abraham (in Gen. 15:5) to give him countless descendants by somehow making him the father of many different people groups.

3:8 Paul now spells out this reasoning in a slightly different way, using a promise that appears several times in Genesis (12:3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; cf. 28:14). If Abraham is the means by which all nations will be blessed, then the blessing must come to them through their faith, apart from doing the Mosaic law. To adopt the Mosaic law is to become a Jew, and if the nations all become Jewish, then Abraham remains the father of Jews only, not the father of many nations or the means by which all the nations of the earth are blessed (cf. Rom. 4:13–17).

3:9 “So then” introduces the result of God’s promise in verse 8. Since God promised a blessing to the Gentiles through Abraham, he blesses Gentiles whose faith parallels the faith of Abraham. These believing Gentiles remain Gentiles, but they are also justified through faith just as Abraham was justified by faith, and in this sense are blessed “in” him.

3:10 There is a second reason why (“for”) the Mosaic law cannot be the means by which God would bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham. It cannot be the source of blessing for anyone because it pronounces a curse on everyone who fails to abide by its every commandment (Deut. 27:26; cf. Deut. 28:58–59; Lev. 26:14–16). Paul assumes that no one can meet this standard and that taking obedience to the Mosaic law as a path to blessing is a dead end (cf. Rom. 9:30–10:4).

Any of Paul’s readers who knew the Scriptures well and reflected on the context of Deuteronomy 27:26 would remember that it comes immediately before the detailed list of blessings for obedience to the law and curses for disobedience. The list of blessings is short and general (Deut. 28:1–14), but the description of the curses reads like a summary of Israel’s history (Deut. 28:15–68).47 Despite the ease with which the law of God can be obeyed (Deut. 30:11–14), no one had actually fully obeyed it, and so, apart from God’s saving mercy, everyone stands under the law’s curse.

3:11 Paul maintains, however, that, according to the plain sense of Scripture, God did not intend people to find life through the law. He quotes Habakkuk 2:4 to show that Scripture instead supports the notion that those who are justified by faith will live. In its original context, the line Paul quotes is part of the Lord’s answer to Habakkuk’s complaint that the Lord is punishing Israelite unrighteousness by an invading nation even wickeder than Israel. God seems to “remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he” (Hab. 1:13). In reply, God urges Habakkuk not to judge his justice by present conditions but to wait patiently for God to finish his work. Eventually, “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14). The righteous person, the Lord says, shall live by his steadfast trust in him (Hab. 2:4).

At a fundamental level, Paul’s use of the quotation makes the same point as it does in Habakkuk. Both describe a person who is in a right relationship with God because that person trusts him to take care of the future. Within Paul’s argument, however, the terms of the quotation have an added significance. Paul probably intends his use of the term “live” to function, as it does in the Mosaic law, as the opposite of “death” and “curse” (Deut. 30:19). The expression “the righteous” refers to the person who is rightly related to God, and, as in the ESV footnote, “by faith” modifies “the righteous” to describe how the righteous person becomes righteous, or is justified (cf. Gal. 2:16; 3:6, 8, 24; 5:5).

Paul uses the line from Habakkuk, then, to summarize an important theme of Scripture (e.g., Gen. 15:6; Ps. 143:2). No one is able to become rightly related to God and therefore escape punishment on the day of judgment by doing the law. A person can “live” in that sense only by trusting in God’s gracious provision of a way other than obedience to the law to be at peace with him.

3:12 To clarify this point, Paul uses the law itself to describe the only path that the law offers to life. Leviticus 18:5 offers life to those who do the law, but as Paul has already implied in Galatians 2:16 and 3:10, no one can do enough of the law to receive its promise of life. It is a point Leviticus itself confirms in its own short and general list of blessings for obedience (Lev. 26:3–13) and its long, detailed, and prophetic list of curses for disobedience (Lev. 26:14–39).

3:13 God’s provision for rescue from the law’s curse on all who have disobeyed it is the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross. Greek speakers could use the term “redeemed” (from Gk. exagorazō) to describe buying someone out of slavery (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 15.7.1), and later Paul will argue that when Christ redeemed those under the law, he made it possible for them to leave slavery and become sons (4:4–7).48 Therefore, although he does not explicitly mention slavery here, he probably has it in mind as a metaphor for the law’s penalty of death for disobedience (cf. Rom. 1:32).

Christ was able to redeem believers from the law’s curse by enduring the curse in their place. When he died on the cross, his death substituted for their death. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

To support his case, Paul cites a line from the Mosaic law (Deut. 21:23) that describes the person hung on wood as cursed. In its original context, Deuteronomy 21:23 refers to the exposure of a dead body by hanging it from a piece of wood (Hb. ʻets; Gk. xylon), probably a pole or a tree. This law seems to regulate the ancient Near Eastern custom of exposing an executed criminal’s dead body (e.g., Gen. 40:19; Est. 5:14). God’s curse rests not on the person’s dead body but on the living person because of the sin that person committed.

The exposed body of the executed criminal was not to hang on the tree for long (Deut. 21:23; Josh. 10:27); otherwise it would defile the land. God had given the land to his people so that they might live happy, satisfied lives, but rebellion against God, punishment, and the shameful exposure of the criminal demonstrated how far from this ideal humanity had strayed. The exposure of the dead body and its quick removal to avoid the land’s defilement may demonstrate these theological truths.49

Crucifixion was different from this custom because the criminal was hung alive on the cross before dying from some combination of exposure, blood loss, asphyxiation, and physical trauma. The obvious similarities between crucifixion and exposure of a dead criminal’s body on an elevated piece of wood, however, were not lost on first-century Jewish Christians. They frequently spoke of Jesus’ crucifixion as his hanging on a piece of wood or tree (xylon; Acts 5:30; 10:39; 13:29; 1 Pet. 2:24). It is unlikely, then, that Paul was the first person to associate Jesus’ death on the cross with the law’s curse on the executed criminal or with the substitutionary, atoning nature of Jesus death. If he had not died for his own sins (Luke 23:4, 14–15, 22, 41, 47), he must have suffered the law’s penalty of death in place of others and for them (e.g., Mark 10:45; 1 Pet. 2:22–24).

3:14 Paul now circles back to his main argument, that justification and membership in the family of Abraham and the people of God comes to all those, including Gentiles, who have faith in the gospel’s message (v. 6). His argument in verses 7–13 proceeded in two steps. First, he showed (vv. 7–9) that God’s promise to bless the nations through Abraham could be fulfilled only if the Gentiles were included in God’s people by faith. To include them by means of the law would make them Jews, and thus they would no longer be “the nations” who were the object of the promise. Second, he argued (vv. 10–14) that seeking life by keeping the law was, in any case, a dead end for both Jews and Gentiles. Only curse comes by that means, not blessing, because no one can obey the law (vv. 10, 12). The only way out of this predicament runs through the substitutionary, atoning death of Jesus, who did not deserve the law’s curse but absorbed it for those who did deserve it (vv. 11, 13).

Now in verse 14 Paul explains why God arranged history this way, and he articulates two reasons. First, God did this in order to fulfill his promise to Abraham to bless “all the nations” in him (v. 8; cf. Gen. 12:3; 17:5; 18:18). Second, God did this in order to fulfill his promise to pour out his Spirit on Israel and on all people at the time of Israel’s future restoration (Gal. 3:2–3, 5; Ezek. 36:26–27; 37:1–14; Joel 2:28–29). Paul’s “we” includes himself and other Jewish Christians among those who, like the Galatians in Galatians 3:1–5, receive the Spirit by faith in the gospel.

3:15 The word “brothers” (Gk. adelphoi) signals the start of a new paragraph (vv. 15–18), as it sometimes does elsewhere (e.g., 6:1). Paul’s new point is that God’s covenantal promise to Abraham finds its fulfillment in Christ and has primacy over the Mosaic covenant.

Outside of biblical Greek, the term translated “covenant” (diathēkē) most often means “last will and testament.” This meaning does not fit Paul’s argument, however, since one who has made a will could change it, even after it has been ratified.

It is more likely, then, that Paul refers to a “covenant,” which is the meaning of the term throughout the Septuagint and elsewhere in Paul. Covenants between human beings were sealed with an oath that appealed to God and were therefore inviolable, even if one of the parties to the covenant lied in order to obtain the agreement (Josh. 9:15, 19–20).50 Paul would have been familiar with many such human covenants from Scripture (e.g., Gen. 21:27–32; 31:44; 1 Sam. 18:3).51 Here, then, he begins to compare the inviolable nature of such human covenants with the even more inviolable nature of a covenant to which God himself is a party. God’s covenant with Abraham was just such a covenant.

3:16 Paul describes this covenant as “promises . . . made to Abraham and to his offspring.” God makes many promises to Abraham in the Genesis narrative, but they all connect more or less directly with the two basic promises that he and his offspring would receive “the land” and be the means of blessing many nations (12:7; 13:15; 15:18; 17:8; 21:15–18).

In the Septuagint, the promises to Abraham and his offspring involving “the land” could be interpreted to involve “the earth,” since the Greek term gē could have either meaning. This seems to be how Paul understands God’s covenant promises to Abraham: God promised to bless all the nations of the earth and the whole earth through him and his offspring.52

Paul then takes the further step of observing that the term “offspring” is singular rather than plural. The Greek word behind this translation (sperma) means “seed.” Like that English term, it can refer to a quantity of seeds (e.g., “He sowed his seed in the field”) or a single seed, and the single seed can be described in the plural (e.g., “He sowed his seeds in the field”). Although the Genesis narrative seems to use the term in the collective sense, Paul observes that it is singular, and he believes this foreshadows the single person Christ.

The full significance of this statement is not clear at this point, but later (3:29) Paul will observe that the single person Christ is actually more than a single person. Because Christians are united to him by faith, he represents all of God’s people. The singular and collective meanings of “seed” (in the sense of “offspring”), then, represent this twofold significance of his being that seed. For now, however, Paul is content to make this assertion as a way of connecting the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham with Christ.

3:17 Paul knows that the preceding assertion was dense and difficult, so he states his main point clearly (“This is what I mean . . .”). The Mosaic law, which God gave to Israel at Mount Sinai after God’s covenant with Abraham, could not annul the extraordinarily inviolable Abrahamic covenant. If even human covenants, made with a divine oath, are inviolable (v. 15), how much more inviolable is a covenant made with God himself as one of the parties in the agreement? The false teachers in Galatia, then, cannot subordinate God’s multinational, worldwide covenant with Abraham to the ethnically and nationally specific covenant God made with Israel in the Mosaic law. The Abrahamic covenant came first, and no later covenant can invalidate it.

3:18 Paul now explains (“for”) why the continuing validity of the Mosaic law would nullify God’s promise to Abraham. His use of the word “inheritance” shows that he has never lost sight of the question raised in verses 7–9, “Who are the sons of Abraham?” or, in the terms of the Genesis narrative, “Who will be Abraham’s heir?” and “Will Abraham inherit the land?” (Gen. 15:4, 8). The promise to Abraham and to his seed that he would inherit the earth and that through them many nations would be blessed cannot see fulfillment through the ethnically and nationally specific Mosaic law. If Gentiles are compelled to adopt the Mosaic law, then they become Jews, and the blessing of Abraham does not flow to the nations (3:14).

3:19–20 This naturally raises the question of why God gave the law at all, and Paul’s answer indicates that the law had a separate, temporary purpose that was qualitatively different from the purpose of the Abrahamic covenant.

Paul makes this point in three steps. First, he says that the law was added “because of transgressions” in the sense that, by making God’s will clear and concrete, it highlighted the egregious nature of human violation of that will. It demonstrated, in other words, how deeply rebellious were human beings toward God (cf. Rom. 3:20; 5:20; 7:5, 7, 13; 2 Cor. 3:7).

Second, the law governed God’s people only until the coming of “the offspring.” As Paul already said in Galatians 3:16, Christ is this “offspring.”

Third, God’s use of angels as intermediaries in giving the law confirms its temporary and subordinate nature. It is not clear exactly why the angels’ intermediation (cf. Deut. 33:2; Acts 7:38, 53; Heb. 2:2) shows this. Paul may have an implicit comparison in mind between the direct access to God that the gospel gives (2 Cor. 3:16–18; Eph. 2:18; cf. Rom. 5:2) and the distance sin made necessary between God and human beings when God gave the law (2 Cor. 3:7–8, 12–13; Heb. 12:18–21).

Paul’s added comment about the angels’ intermediation and the unity of God (Gal. 3:20) is somewhat obscure. It probably implies, however, that the circumstances surrounding the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham through the gospel, perhaps especially the gospel’s proclamation to the Gentiles, demonstrate better than the circumstances surrounding the giving of the law that there is one God, creator of all things and people (cf. Rom. 3:29–30).

3:21–22 The angels’ involvement in giving the law does not mean that the law came from angels rather than God or that it works at cross purposes to the Abrahamic covenant and its fulfillment. The law does not lie. It truly contains the will of God, and if people could keep it, God would acknowledge that they were in a right relationship with him and would give them life on that basis. This was not, however, the law’s purpose. Rather, God intended it to support the Abrahamic covenant by imprisoning everything under sin.

Paul shifts from speaking of the “law” to speaking of “Scripture,” perhaps to emphasize that, like all of Scripture, the law is God’s Word and expresses his will. His language of imprisonment under the law emerges from a conviction, expressed more fully elsewhere, that when a sinful person encounters the law apart from the power of the Spirit, sin and the law together create not less but more rebellion against God (Rom. 5:20; 7:5–6, 8–11, 21–23). It is possible that Paul is thinking of Adam’s encounter with God’s command (Rom. 5:15–21) or of his own preconversion zeal for the law, which led him not to obey God but to persecute the church (Gal. 1:13–14; Phil. 3:6).

The encounter between God’s will and the sinful human being, however, serves God’s purpose in fulfilling his covenant with Abraham through those who believe the gospel, for it demonstrates so clearly the futility of any attempt to obtain righteousness and life by keeping the law. As Paul says in Romans 7:13, sin produces death in the human being by means of something good (God’s commandment) “in order that sin might be shown to be sin” and “become sinful beyond measure.”

3:23–25 Paul repeats the point of verses 21–22 with an illustration from everyday Greco-Roman life. A “guardian” (Gk. paidagōgos) was a slave that wealthy families used to babysit their children, offer them some basic educational and moral guidance, and especially protect them from harm. Some children appreciated their guardians in later years, but guardians also often appear in literature and artwork as old, temperamental, and harsh. Since Paul speaks in the context of the law as holding believers captive and imprisoning them (v. 23), he probably has the guardian’s temporary role in a person’s life in mind as well as the widely circulated negative portrayal of this common figure in Greco-Roman life.53

Just as in verses 21–22, then, Paul’s point is that the law prepared the way for the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham through the gospel of justification by faith. The law demonstrated how deep the waters of sin run in human nature and how futile is the attempt to gain life by the law. This was God’s intended role for the law, and it performed that role admirably, but just as a young adult outgrows any need for an old and stern attendant, so those who have embraced the gospel have matured beyond any need for the law.54 They have also escaped the law’s harsh collusion with sinful human nature that enslaves human beings to sin.

3:26 For the first time since the beginning of the section (vv. 1–5), Paul turns directly to the Galatians again (“you”) in order to bring home the practical result of his argument. The reason the Gentile Galatian believers are no longer under the law, Paul says, is that they “are all sons of God, through faith” (v. 26). It is not, then, that they are merely sons of Abraham (v. 7) but that they are sons of God through their union with Christ, God’s Son (1:16). The people of Israel sometimes appear in Scripture as God’s metaphorical “sons” (e.g., Isa. 1:2) or collectively as his “son” (e.g., Ex. 4:22).55 By calling the Galatian believers “sons of God,” then, Paul emphasizes their status as full members of God’s people apart from adopting the Mosaic law (cf. Gal. 4:1–7).

3:27–29 The Galatians are “in Christ Jesus” and are “sons of God” (v. 26) because (“for”) they experienced union with Christ at the time they heard and believed the gospel. The word “baptize” (Gk. baptizō) means “dip” (e.g., 2 Kings 5:14 LXX), “ritually wash” (Jdt. 12:7; Sir. 34:25; Mark 7:4), or “fully immerse” (e.g., Josephus, Antiquities 15.55). It is possible that it refers literally here to the Christian ritual of baptism, but even if that is right, Paul is interested primarily in the metaphorical immersion of the Galatian believers “into Christ.” Paul’s further explanation of what he means as being clothed in Christ shows this clearly. “Through” their “faith” (Gal. 3:26) in the gospel of Christ’s atoning, liberating death, they have become united with Christ.

This union with Christ makes them a new people, what Paul will later call “a new creation” (6:15; cf. 2 Cor. 5:17). Old categories that fostered human inequality and social division have dissolved for believers (cf. Eph. 2:13–18).

Union with Christ also makes the Galatians “offspring” or “seed” of Abraham since Christ is Abraham’s “offspring” (Gal. 3:16) and they are one with him. This means they are sons not only of God (v. 26) but also of Abraham (v. 7). This makes them heirs of the promise God gave to Abraham and his offspring that they would inherit “the earth” (Gen. 12:7; 13:15; 15:18; 17:8).