Chapter 5
2025 - Spent over two hours on Isa 1,2. Absolutely worth the time...but now I must just read through Gal 5. If I can "just" do that!
The first verse of 5 seems a better conclusion to the thoughts of 4. It seems to be a summary statement:
1 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. [Gal 5:1 ESV]
This chapter begins the last of three major divisions in the MSB outline. The rest is called "Practical: The Privileges of Justification".
Paul tells them now that if they accept the teaching of the Judaizers, and accept circumcision as a requirement, and the Mosaic Law as a requirement, then they must keep the whole law. If they make one mistake, the law condemns them to death. And they WILL make a mistake, inevitably. This is a choice they make in what they believe. They can depend on their own perfection in keeping the Law, and if successful, they will die un-condemned by the law, and so go to heaven. OR, they can accept the finished work of Christ, who was condemned vicariously for all our sins, and be obliged to him for his benevolence toward us. Either you accept the Law and "fall away" from grace, or you accept Christ's teaching, and "rise above" the requirements of the law. In context this is a contrast of choices going forward. It is not a statement that those who are deceived by the Judaizers even for a moment are doomed to hell in eternity. That just isn't what Paul is talking about.
Here is the introductory verse:
2 Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. [Gal 5:2 ESV]...and then this:
4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. [Gal 5:4 ESV]
This is very strong language. How to deal with this since it "doesn't say what we want it to say"? We could say he was talking to the unconverted. But that's not who he's been talking to before, and I see no indication that his intended audience has changed from those in the first four chapters. He has previously worried that maybe they are not as "saved" as he thought they were when he was there. If he is talking here to those, who embraced grace in the "heat of the moment", but were not truly saved, and they are now putting their hope of eternity in circumcision and keeping the law instead of in grace, then...what? They "fall" from the higher way - from the heavenly Jerusalem about which he talked to them in the previous chapter, and tie themselves in bondage to the earthly, the lower, Jerusalem. This is possible, because he most certainly did contrast Jerusalem above and Jerusalem below.
Even looked at this way, the question remains. He says "You are severed from Christ". You can't be severed from if you were not connected to. We could say Paul is using severe imagery because this error is so severe. But I don't like resorting to such things. I want to know what he really means. Enough of my thinking, what does MSB say?
MSB takes the position that those who do this, who move the object of their faith from grace to law, were never saved in the first place. MSB does not go into a long discussion about this. MSB talks about what severed means and what fall means. He says this is about those who were exposed to the gospel, who heard it and liked it, but who are now looking in a different direction, back to the law and bondage. If they do this, and put their "true" faith in the law, then they will not again turn to Christ. It is in that sense that they are severed.
A difficult passage at best. In verse 3, Paul does say "I testify again...", referring back to what went on in the first four chapters. That incorporates the "labor in vain", the "anguish of childbirth", the heavenly and earthly Jerusalems. Paul is reiterating what he's already said, he is NOT introducing a new doctrinal concept. He is worried they were never saved, not that they were saved and are putting away their salvation. That is how I see it today.
2024 - Again this year, I think Paul is saying that if they go back to circumcision and the Law, it means they were never saved. He is saying that if the Holy Spirit indwells - and I think he mentions that at least twice in those first four chapters - and if you really received the earnest of salvation, there is NO WAY you would ever go back to the Law. Paul is removing all wiggle room about this. It is a choice - and God knows which one you choose - between Law and Grace. The two CANNOT BE COMBINED!
2023 - This verse needs to be included:
3 I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. [Gal 5:3 ESV]. Paul is saying that "including" the law as a requirement of the gospel cannot be done piecemeal. The Law in internally insistent that it is an all or none approach. It cannot be that the New Covenant is grace plus circumcision. Circumcision is a small part of the law and if you take any part, you must take it all. The Judaizers are teaching both a false gospel AND a false interpretation of the Law. And the purpose of the Law was appeasement. If you depend on the Law for appeasement, then you are "severed" from Christ, because he is about atonement! Once for all stuff as contrasted with the repeated but temporary appeasements required over and over by the Law. You can't leave those appeasements out and just do circumcision. How could that possibly work!? You have fallen away from your dependence on grace, and gone back to dependence on sacrificial appeasement. This is the fall. It is not about their eternal state, it is about their demonstration of their salvation. Does it show by devotion to a ritualized sacrificial system, or does it show by love and good works? Well which did Jesus teach? That question at least, is pretty easy!
2024 - This one:
4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. [Gal 5:4 ESV]. IF you decide to follow the Law, then you no longer trust in grace to save you. Grace is the better way, the higher way. You do not fall from low to high, but high to low. Everything Paul has said to this point is about being free instead of being a slave. Why would you fall back from freedom to slavery? This is the fall he is talking about, NOT a lost of a salvation you never really had.
2022 - We might also see in this the difficulty of a life built entirely on faith. As humans we are not very good at "believing in what we cannot see", and especially so when it is critical to our futures. We have this built in compulsion - at least in this country - to "make it happen", to "take the bull by the horns", to "bring our A game". All these expressions are about doing it ourselves, earning it, deserving it because we put in the effort...but faith is about counting all those things as worthless. As ineffectual. Faith requires that we submit to the efforts of another our future - our eternity. We fall on our knees in abject helplessness because we can do nothing to earn or deserve salvation. We want a gift, we want THE gift. And we must "ask" someone else, for whom we have done nothing noteworthy, someone who owes us nothing, to "donate" it to us. Our culture is not ok with that. Maybe that is why the US is not in the book of Revelation. Our national pride doomed us from the start. We lasted as long as we were a "church going nation" and acknowledged that God was ultimately in charge, but as we have lost our sense of humility, our country has crumbled. We seem to have been a 200 year "flash in the pan"..
Possible FB post using Gal. 5:4.
2023 - If Paul has up to this point in the letter been speaking to those who were never saved - if we say that's what the letter is about - then what exactly was Paul's hope for the time he had invested there? That just few were really saved, despite all the things he'd done there, despite miracles and deep teaching and the indwelling Holy Spirit that he holds up as EVIDENCE of true salvation? And his hope was that the rest would also be saved after he left through the testimony of those where were saved? But now the Judaizers have come in and are doing an effective job of convincing those unsaved who are still attending that they must obey the law of Moses while perhaps reverencing Christ, but that their true path to salvation lies in their adherence to the law, and because of this, Paul is worried that all the "maybe later" souls will be lost to the Judaizers. We would be saying that Paul's primary concern, and the audience to whom he writes, are the unsaved attenders of the Galatian church. This does not seem likely. Another possibility that just hit me is that it is the future of the Galatian church - the perpetuation of that church so that Paul can present her as a perfect bride on that day - that is Paul's concern. In that case, he could be writing to the majority of already saved people that he left in that church in order to instruct them as to how the arguments and proposals of the Judaizers should be answered. He does this to prevent the teachings of the Judaizers from "taking over" as the accepted gospel in that church going forward. Paul knows that those who accept such a gospel will not be saved and that the long term result will be an end to this great church. You cannot have a church with only unbelievers as members. AND, if this is the case, then it would make sense that Paul would be setting up all these "difficult to explain" situations are NOT scriptural, do not have a place in the possibilities of the true gospel, and should be refuted by recalling this, that, and the other. For instance, consider how to handle a person who has truly been saved but is persuaded to also keep the law. What kind of a "state is that"? Such a person is practicing the law though he has no need for the law. What is the result? Focus on the earthly, on the physical, and the NEGLECT of the spiritual state into which he was converted at salvation. So a diminution of the "force" that drives the church forward in evangelism and charity doing the works of Jesus in the real world. The saved don't become lost, but they "fall" from the higher spiritual calling of the New Covenant back into the physical requirements of the Law which has no provision for advancing the kingdom, but was only there in the first place to demonstrate that sin is inevitable in a physical sense, to foreshadow the coming of Christ, and the appease God until that time.
2023 - Yes. THIS makes sense as to Paul's audience and his motivation for writing not only to this church but to all those to whom he wrote. The problems were not always the same, so the focus of each letter is different. BUT, at this point, I think we can confidently say that Paul was always writing to the saved, and that his motivation was to preserved the church until Christ comes far more than to save a few people and then move on. Paul wasn't trying to keep a single generation of sons and daughters of Christ intact, he was trying to save the church for future generations!!! This longer view is why he can set up these impossible "states" that do not and cannot exist - like a person who believes in Christ but depends on Law for heaven, a person who has freedom in Christ but remains a slave to the law, which is clearly NOT a real state. He does this to instruct the truly saved in the church that the teaching of the Judaizers REQUIRES such ridiculous states, and show the saved in the church how to scripturally and rationally show the impossibility of such states. "Straw man" keeps coming into my mind, though that is not the proper term for this. A straw man is an "invented" problem the other side has that can be easily torn down....but that in reality is not what the other side believes. Instead, though I have no name for it, Paul is taking the teachings of the Judaizers to their natural conclusions, he is pointing out the resultant relationships between God and man that arise from the full application of their teaching, and then showing that these cannot exist. You cannot be a slave to one and free to another. The only states allowed are slave and not slave.
2023 - I think this understanding will make ALL of Paul's letters easier to understand, will make all his teachings easier to categorize, and give us a working model for how to bring harmony to his most controversial writings.
vs 6 is Paul's recommendation for which choice is best:
6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. [Gal 5:6 ESV]
The next paragraph starts with this verse:
7 You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? [Gal 5:7 ESV]
...and ends with this verse:
12 I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves! [Gal 5:12 ESV]
Paul is pulling no punches about what he thinks of the Judaizers. He is leaving the Galatians no room to believe these false teachers have some good about them, and that they must be at least partly correct. Paul wants them maimed, unacceptable, incomplete, and of no import. He comes near hating them. The "a little leaven" comment seems to imply that there are only a few, perhaps only one Judaizer that is leading them all astray. Paul is asking them to narrow it down and identify the source of this teaching.
Beginning in vs 13 Paul seems to be telling them not to use their freedom to enslave themselves again. That might be what it means. If so, it certainly contradicts the "fall from grace" mentioned previously. Is Paul saying that while they are "free" to become slaves to the law if they want to do so, he strongly advises against it. Because it precludes the blessings of the freedom that Christ died to obtain for us? This does seem to make some sense. He goes on then to encourage them to love one another. Maybe this false teaching was splitting the church, and Paul is encouraging them to work it out, based on his teaching and not that of the false teachers, and to stay united and to love one another, as Jesus taught. Error must be corrected in love, not in church splitting!
2021-2, Except, Paul is not saying they are free to go back to the Law, and discouraging that idea. He is not talking about freedom from law, but about flesh. This I guess was the dilemma. How do you tell a people that once they are saved they can never be unsaved, and tell them that they don't need a lot of sacrifice and ritual and priestly confession, BUT, they are not free to practice immorality and fleshly things with abandon and not sweat it at all. Freedom from the sacrificial and ritual law is not freedom from other things handed down by Moses. There is a difference, as we saw back in 2Co. You don't have to sacrifice, but you don't "get" to sleep with the neighbors wife - and then expect her husband not to be upset because you are free in Christ. Knowing what is "gone" and what remains is not, to me, a super-simple little problem. It was a big deal for them to know what was abrogated and what was not.
I believe there are more than enough places where the Bible says "perseverance of the saints", and not nearly as many that imply falling from grace. There's the whole word study on "fall" that says its distance but not full separation. But this says "severed from Christ". This is indeed a hard passage.
Possible FB follow-up to Monday 11/21. I like the wording here, and could "propose" that whole three section - criminal penalties, dietary law, sacrificial law - view of the law to show what in fact was abrogated and what still stands. Needs a verse though...
2023 - The Law was to inform Israel of their innate and irresistible tendency to sin, and to provide a way for appeasing God temporarily - until Christ came - and ATONED for those sins. So anything the Law identified specifically AS sin is STILL sin. Grace does not make those sins ok. Grace makes further appeasement - and all the parts of the Law that are about how to appease God - totally unnecessary. And to be complete, the dietary laws were to set Israel apart from other nations and maintain a theocratically based separation of the Yahweh worshipers from the polytheistic idol worshipers that existed ubiquitously at that time. But also see para starting "MAYBE SO..." just below.
2025 - This amazing, freeing verse:
14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." [Gal 5:14 ESV]. All that is required of us under the new covenant is this attitude! We have no "laws" other than this. But we should understand the implications of this. It must mean that nothing ever required by the Law was a violation of "love your neighbor". Nothing we decide to do in loving our neighbor today would have violated the Law. So we CANNOT, under the guise of loving our neighbor, decide that homosexual relationships are ok. If they are now ok, then the Old and New Covenants contradict each other on moral grounds.
Hmm...I know what I'm trying to say here but it isn't coming out right. Too many churches, too many people, justify acceptance of things like homosexual relationships, belief that there are many roads to heaven, perhaps even idol worship, in the name of being loving Christians who do not condemn others.
However, as we move on to vs 16, what Paul has in view seems less embracing the Law as the way of the flesh and more about the lusts of the flesh. (2021 - I think this is what he is talking about. Practical matters. They are free of the law, but the last thing they want to do is behave as if the prohibitions of the law are meaningless. It says "no adultery", "no murder", and so on. Embracing grace instead of Law does not mean these prohibitions go away and adultery and murder are ok. Not in the least does it mean that. The Law is to be abandoned as the way of salvation, and grace embraced instead. It is that aspect that he has been talking about. But just in case the next false teachers who arrive preach "free love", Paul warns them.) But MAYBE NOT...look at this verse coming right after the Spirit being against the flesh and the flesh against the Spirit:
18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. [Gal 5:18 ESV]
MAYBE SO...because beginning in vs 19, we have a long list of the works of the flesh, and the list is not about the requirements of the Law of Moses, but about lust and so on.
This would tie in with the teaching in James about how those who are saved will do good works out of thankfulness and gratitude and love. They are not "compelled" by any creed or code or "tally sheet" to do these good works. They will just be inclined to do them as true children of God. Even the saved are tempted by the lusts of the flesh. God arranged it so that the things the Spirit wants inside us are also strong desires, opposed to, in conflict with, what the flesh wants. This is conscience. We don't need the Law to tells us right from wrong anymore because that has been taken over - superseded in a better way - by the Spirit within us.
2021-2, Maybe this is why it is difficult. The parts of the law that are no more are not really separable from the parts that remain by chapter and verse. But if we let the Spirit bear witness with our conscience, we can know what God approves and what he does not. Sanctification, if we study and work and pray, will win in the end and we will do the things we should and shun the things we should not. There is still some work to it! And this verse agrees with that:
[Gal 5:18 ESV] But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
You can only be loyal to one. If led by the Spirit, stop looking to the intricate details of the leprosy laws for whether you're unclean or not. If you are led by the law, you need a verse for every problem.
2021-2, Vs 19 -21 make very clear what constitutes the things of the flesh. Many specifics. Theft is not here, murder is not here. This may well have been "obvious". Sex is here, but it is not the only thing. Idolatry, sorcery, fits of anger, envy. All these things are to "indulge" ourselves, to uncage our desires, ambitions, pride. This is flesh. And right after this list of what the flesh is about is the contrasting list of the fruits of the Spirit. This is the context. I wonder if more could be learned from the contrasts than from the items on the list themselves. Sorcery is a pretty specific negative, but self-control...that's pretty broad, and speaks back to self-indulgence. The "good" list seems to be about principles, the bad list about specific examples. Maybe. It would be worth a deeper look.
2023 - Verses 19-23 ought to be kept always together. Instead, we only hear about the fruits of the Spirit. But Paul's whole point here is that the Law prohibits specific behavior - physical, fleshly behavior. That is all it does. The Spirit that indwells doesn't do that but instead encourages the spiritual aspects of life and UNSPECIFIED good works. The Law specifically says "DO NOT DO THIS". The New Covenant says "Be lead by the Spirit". There are no specifics that say do not "murder", but it says love your neighbor. You don't murder those you love, so this covers it. The NC does not say "Pray five times a day toward Jerusalem" and it does not say "Five Hail Mary's and two "Our Fathers". It is not specific as to what we do, but we can see the results of "love your neighbor", because that shows up as the fruits of the spirit. All we have to do is follow the Spirit inside us, and when we get this right, it shows up as fruit of the Spirit. The results show. The results of conformance with prohibitions is not observable. The Law is not about what we see, but what we don't see. Grace is about what we see. Such a wonderful contrast between the Law and Grace, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone put it this way.
2025 - This verse:
21 envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. [Gal 5:21 ESV]. At the end of this long list we finally get the verb" "do" in the phrase "those who do". This is a present active participle. In English the participle is about words that end in -ing. I think the translators might have more clearly communicated this verb if they had used an -ing. Then it might read "those DOING such things", which communicates that this is an ongoing, frequent, repetitive behavior. As it reads here, it says those who "do" such things, as if one time ever past present or future would keep you forever from the Kingdom of God. We know it doesn't mean that...but it pretty much DOES say that. Not my favorite translation.