📖 Galatians Intensive — Unit 5: From Slaves to Sons

Text: Galatians 4:1-31 (NKJV)

The Heir as a Child

Paul has shown that the law was our tutor; now he presses the picture further. "The heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all, but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father." A young heir owns the whole estate by right, yet while he is still a child he lives much like a servant, under guardians who direct his every step. So it was with God's people: "Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world." Under the law they were held like minors, not yet entered into the full freedom that was theirs by promise. The bondage was real, but it was never meant to be permanent.

God Sent Forth His Son

Then came the turning point of all history. "When the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons." At the moment appointed by the Father, the Son entered our world — truly born of a woman, truly placed under the law He had given. He came under the law in order to keep it perfectly and to bear its curse, and so to redeem those imprisoned beneath it. The purpose was not merely to free slaves, but to make them sons: that we might receive the adoption as sons. Redemption and adoption are the twin gifts of that first Christmas — the Son became what we are that we might become what He is by grace.

In the fullness of time God sent forth His Son to redeem slaves, and then sent forth the Spirit of His Son to make those slaves cry, "Abba, Father."

The Spirit of His Son: Abba, Father

Adoption is no cold legal arrangement; it brings the warmth of the family into the heart. "Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, 'Abba, Father!'" The same Spirit who moved the Son now moves in the believer, teaching him to speak to God with the very word of a child to his father. And Paul draws the conclusion plainly: "Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ." The believer is not a hired servant working for wages, nor a minor under guardians, but a grown son with the full standing of the family and the whole inheritance secured to him through Christ.

Why Turn Back to Bondage?

In light of such a standing, the Galatians' drift makes no sense, and Paul is grieved by it. Once, not knowing God, they had served things that by nature are not gods at all. But now, having come to know God — or rather, having been known by God — "how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which you desire again to be in bondage?" To leave the freedom of sonship and return to a yoke of religious observance is to go backward into slavery. "You observe days and months and seasons and years." Paul does not despise reverence, but he sees the danger: they were treating the calendar of the law as the ground of their acceptance. So he says soberly, "I am afraid for you, lest I have labored for you in vain."

Paul's Personal Appeal

Now the apostle speaks not as a judge but as a friend. "Brethren, I urge you to become like me, for I became like you." He reminds them how warmly they had once received him. When he first preached to them in physical infirmity, they did not despise his weakness; "you received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus." Such was their love that they would have plucked out their own eyes and given them to him. Where had that joy gone? And then the wounded question of a true pastor: "Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?" The one who tells the truth is the truest friend, even when the truth stings.

Zeal, True and False

Paul exposes the motives of the false teachers. "They zealously court you, but for no good; yes, they want to exclude you, that you may be zealous for them." Their eagerness was not love but ambition; they wanted to shut the Galatians out of true liberty so that they would become dependent followers. It is good to be zealous in a good thing, Paul says, and always — not only when he is present. Then he opens his pastor's heart: "My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you." He travails for them a second time as a mother in labor, longing not that they keep a calendar, but that Christ Himself be formed within them. He wishes he could be with them and change his tone, for he is perplexed about them.

The Allegory: Hagar and Sarah

To those determined to be under the law, Paul says, in effect, listen to what the law itself shows. "Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman." The son of the bondwoman, Hagar, was born according to the flesh; the son of the freewoman, Sarah, was born through promise. These things, Paul says, are symbolic, "for these are the two covenants." The one from Mount Sinai gives birth to bondage — this is Hagar, answering to the earthly Jerusalem, which is in bondage with her children. "But the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all." The believer's true mother-city is not the city of law and slavery, but the free city above, and her children are free.

Cast Out the Bondwoman; Children of Promise

Paul brings the allegory home to the Galatians directly. "Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise." They were not born of the flesh and the law, but of the promise of God, like Isaac. And just as Ishmael, born of the flesh, once mocked Isaac, born of the Spirit, so now the children of the law persecute the children of promise. But the verdict of Scripture is clear: "Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman." Law and grace cannot share the inheritance; the way of works must be put out. And so Paul concludes with a banner over the whole chapter: "So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free."

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