The Heart Of Paul’s Theology: Paul And The GalatiansSample

Further Arguments for Justification by Faith: Galatians 4:12-31

After appealing to the initial salvation experience of the Galatians and to the biblical account of Abraham’s faith, Paul addressed the Galatians’ current experience in Galatians 4:12-20. Consider what he wrote in 4:15-16:

What has happened to all your joy? … Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? (Galatians 4:15-16).

Here Paul expressed deep concern for the Galatians’ spiritual well-being; he wanted them to recognize their desperate spiritual condition. As the Galatians turned from the gospel, they lost their joy, a fruit of the Holy Spirit that they should have been enjoying. This loss alone should have alerted the Galatians to the fact that there was something wrong with the teaching of Paul’s opponents.

Paul also argued his case against the false teachers by focusing on the biblical record of Abraham’s wives and sons in Galatians 4:21-31. Paul explained that in Genesis 15, God had promised Abraham an heir through his wife Sarah. But Sarah was barren and past childbearing age, so receiving an heir through her required Abraham to have faith in God’s promise. By trusting God to fulfill his word, Sarah had a son, Isaac. Sarah’s child Isaac was a child of promise, and he was accepted as Abraham’s heir and the representative of all who believe. 

But, as Genesis 16 tells us, before Isaac was born, Abraham had grown tired of waiting for God to give him the promised son. So, he turned to Sarah’s slave Hagar to have a child. By doing this, Abraham sought to secure his legacy by human effort, by the effort of the flesh. Hagar bore the child Ishmael to Abraham, but Ishmael was a child of the flesh. God rejected him as Abraham’s heir and he came to represent all who look to the flesh as the way of salvation. After drawing out this contrast between Abraham’s wives and sons, Paul concluded this way in Galatians 4:31:

Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman (Galatians 4:31).

Faith in God’s promise is the way of salvation for Christians just as Isaac was born to Sarah because of Abraham’s faith. Just as in Abraham’s day, believers in every age are justified, included, and empowered to live righteously by means of faith in God’s promises, not by their own merit.

So we’ve seen that Paul offered four main arguments to explain that believers receive all of God’s blessings by means of faith alone. He argued from the Galatians’ early experience of salvation, from the faith of Abraham, from the Galatians’ recent loss of joy, and from the record of Abraham’s wives and sons.