Galatians 4:21–5:1
21 Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. 23 But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. 24 Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia;1 she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. 27 For it is written,
“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear;
break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than those of the one who has a husband.”
28 Now you,2 brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. 29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. 30 But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” 31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.
5 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
1 Some manuscripts For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia 2 Some manuscripts we
Section Overview: An Allegory from Scripture
Paul now shifts from personal appeal (4:12–20) to an appeal from Scripture. He begins with a rhetorical question (v. 21) that leads to a comparison between the story of Hagar and Sarah in Genesis 16–21 and the present status of the law now that the gospel has arrived (Gal. 4:22–26). He finds confirmation in this comparison in Isaiah 54:1 and its wider context, which looks forward to a time when a multiethnic people will fulfill God’s promises to Abraham (Gal. 4:27).
The passage ends with an application of this biblical exposition to the situation in Galatia (4:28–5:1). Paul urges the Galatian Christians, because of what they have just heard from Scripture (cf. 4:21), to reject the false teaching in their midst and stand firm in the freedom from slavery that Christ’s death purchased for them (cf. 3:13; 4:5).
Section Outline
III.C. Paul Shows That the Gospel Is Consistent with the Scriptures (3:6–5:1) . . .
4. An Allegory from Scripture (4:21–5:1)
Response
This passage urges believers of all times to guard their freedom in Christ jealously. This is not freedom to do wrong, as Paul points out clearly in 5:13 (“Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh”), but freedom from any claim (external to the gospel itself) that promises God’s displeasure unless we submit to said claim. Those who believe that Christ’s death has bought them out of slavery to sin and to the law’s justified curse on the sinner must stand firm in their conviction that they are free from God’s wrath.
When well-meaning fellow Christians recommend to us various systems of “godly” child-rearing, financial management, Scripture memory, prayer, mission involvement, or coping with health problems, for example, we should evaluate them to see whether they conform to Scripture and common sense, and use them if they are beneficial. They should not, however, become activities that in our imagination cause God to love us more. If we find ourselves taking pride in such activities and internally condemning those who do not participate with us in them, we are on a dangerous path not unlike the one the Galatians were traveling and that caused Paul such distress.
Some manuscripts For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia
Some manuscripts we
4:21 Paul’s present tense expression “you who desire” (Gk. hoi . . . thelontes) combines with the present tenses in verse 9 (“turn back again,” “want”) to show just how persuasive the false teachers have been. The Galatians are on the verge of apostasy by coming “under” the law’s authority and therefore its curse (cf. 3:10). This desire, however, is not consistent with what the law itself teaches about the temporary nature of its role as a “guardian” for God’s people (3:24).
4:22 Paul now turns to what the Mosaic law actually says about the advisability of coming under its authority at a time after God’s promises to Abraham have already started to be fulfilled. Paul begins to demonstrate this with a concise retelling of the story of Ishmael and Isaac and the strife between them and their mothers, Hagar and Sarah (Gen. 16:1–16; 17:15–21; 18:9–15; 21:1–21). Paul’s first observation about this story is that Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, was a female slave, whereas Sarah, the mother of Isaac, was a free woman. The contrast between slavery and freedom recalls Galatians 2:4, where Paul labels as false brothers the advocates of the position that Gentile Christians must become Jews; these false brothers sought “to spy out our freedom . . . that they might bring us into slavery.”
4:23 Both children were sons of Abraham, but a critical difference separated them. Hagar conceived Ishmael in the normal way, without divine intervention (Gen. 16:4a). The term “flesh” refers to what is merely human rather than divine, with all the weaknesses both physical and moral that go with the human condition (Gal. 1:16; 2:16; 4:13–14). Paul has already implied that the Galatians, by coming under the Mosaic law’s authority, are aligning themselves with “the flesh” (3:3).
Sarah, however, conceived Isaac in old age (Gen. 17:17; 18:11–13; 21:2) through divine intervention (Gen. 17:17, 19; 18:14; 21:1) and in fulfillment of God’s promise (Gen. 21:1). Paul has already made the case that Gentile believers, such as the Galatians, represent the fulfillment of God’s promise that “all the nations of the earth” would be “blessed in [Abraham]” (Gen. 18:18; cf. Gal. 3:16).
4:24b–25 Paul takes Hagar and Sarah as symbols, respectively, for God’s covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai (Ex. 19:5; 24:7) and God’s covenant with Abraham to give him many descendants, bless the nations through him, and give his descendants the earth (Gen. 15:18; 17:2–21; cf. 18:18; 22:15–18). Hagar was both a slave and, as the mother of Ishmael, the progenitor of “the Arabians” (Josephus, Antiquities 1.214). “Arabia” was the area in which Mount Sinai was located. Through Hagar, then, Paul is able to connect God’s covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai with slavery.
Next, he identifies those enslaved under the Sinai covenant with “the present Jerusalem.” Jerusalem was the place where “false brothers” had tried to “spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus” and “bring” Gentile believers, such as Titus, “into slavery” (Gal. 2:4). It was probably also the place from which “certain men came from James” (2:12) to segregate Jewish from Gentile Christians in Antioch as a way of forcing Gentile Christians there to adopt Jewish customs (2:14). This reintroduction of the Mosaic law, with its curse on all those who did not obey its statutes (3:10), and the element of coercion in the tactics of both the “men . . . from James” and the Galatian false teachers (cf. 4:17) probably led Paul to identify “the present Jerusalem” with slavery.
4:26 A new, heavenly Jerusalem sometimes appears in Jewish and early Christian literature as a symbol for God’s future restoration of his creation and his people (e.g., 2 En. 55:3; 2 Esd. 10:25–28; Heb. 11:16; Rev. 21:2). Paul is claiming here that God has now begun to fulfill this expectation in the church.
The grammatical gender of the word “Jerusalem” is feminine in Greek. This allows Paul to identify Jerusalem easily with a mother, and the mother in this case is Sarah. The multiethnic people who believe the gospel are the descendants of Isaac, the child that God promised and miraculously provided to Abraham and Sarah and through whom he would fulfill his covenant promises to Abraham (Gen. 17:19; 21:12). This metaphorical city is “free” because it is no longer under the law’s curse on the disobedient (Gal. 3:10, 13, 22–24; 4:2, 5) and because no one within this “city” is coerced to conform to another nation’s ethnic customs (cf. Rev. 21:24–26).
4:27 Paul supports the point he has just made about the freedom of “the Jerusalem above” with a quotation from Isaiah 54:1. In this text, too, God’s people become a metaphorical mother, but this mother was once barren yet now has many children.
In its original context, the Isaiah passage envisioned the period of Israel’s eschatological restoration in which her “tent” would grow large and her “offspring” would “possess the nations” (Isa. 54:2–3). This phrase echoes God’s promises to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the earth (Gen. 15:7) and that he would become the “father of a multitude of nations” (Gen. 17:4–8). Paul probably has this wider context in mind when he quotes Isaiah 54:1 and sees the extended passage as confirmation of his interpretation of the expansion of the gospel to the Gentiles as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. There is a sense, then, in which this quotation of Isaiah 54:1 supports Paul’s whole interpretation of the story of Hagar and Sarah.
4:28 Paul now applies his allegorical exegesis of Genesis 16–21 directly to the Galatian Christians. Unlike Ishmael, who was born to Abraham in the normal way (“according to the flesh”), but like Isaac, who was born through divine intervention (Gal. 4:23), the Gentile Galatians are the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham to give him numerous descendants, bless the nations through him, and give his descendants the earth.
4:29 Genesis 21:9 records that at some point during Ishmael’s childhood, Sarah saw him “laughing.” Paul understands this to mean that Ishmael was “making sport” (JPS) of or bullying Isaac.
Up to this point in Galatians, the verb “persecute” has referred to Paul’s own pre-Christian persecution of the church (Gal. 1:13, 23) because of his zealous commitment to Jewish tradition (1:13–14; cf. Phil. 3:6). The persecution he refers to here is probably the effort of the false teachers to exclude the Galatians from table fellowship (and, by implication, from the people of God) unless they conform to the Mosaic law (Gal. 4:17; cf. 2:14).
4:30 Paul quotes Sarah’s response to Ishmael’s persecution of Isaac (Gen. 21:10), removing only a few pronouns from the Septuagint in order to contemporize it. He does not say so explicitly, but he implies that just as God wanted Abraham to do as Sarah had told him and cast Hagar and Ishmael out of the family (Gen. 21:10, 12), so the Galatian Christians should reject the troublemakers in their midst, along with their “different gospel” (cf. Gal. 1:6–7).
4:31–5:1 Both Paul and the Galatians (“we”), and by implication all who believe the gospel, are no longer in slavery to the law, with its curse on the disobedient (3:10, 13, 22–24; 4:2, 5). They are also not obligated to become Jewish by adopting the Mosaic law in order to belong to the people of God (2:14; 4:17).
In 5:1, Paul draws the obvious conclusion from this principle for the present situation in Galatia. Christ has set the Galatians free from the “slavery” of the law’s curse by his redeeming death (3:13; 4:5). The Galatians should not, therefore, put themselves, like plow animals, under the oppression of the law’s curse and the false teachers’ insistence that they become Jewish. “Again” points back to 4:9 and serves as a reminder to the Galatians that to adopt the law at this stage of salvation history would be to make an idol of it and to come under its curse just as fully as if they were reverting to their pre-Christian religious rituals.