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Day 3

Lisa Scheffler, author

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If you go way back and trace the history of kingdoms in places like Europe, you will sometimes find a child who is named king. Because of the early death of the monarch, the child who is the rightful heir might be named as ruler. But of course, they don’t yet rule. Although they are the rightful heir, they are just a child. And if they are a child, they understandably aren’t given a lot of decision-making power. Even the young king is told what to eat and when to go to bed. His title means very little until he comes of age.

Paul is continuing to use family language, but he is sketching a picture much bigger than the individual believer. He’s using the image of an heir to represent God’s people.

Read

Galatians 4:1-5

4 What I am saying is that as long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.

Reflect

Essentially, the argument that Paul makes in the passage we read yesterday is: “(1) Faith in Jesus Christ makes a person a “son of God,” and this obtains for everyone (3:28); (2) being a “son of God” means that a person is also a member of Abraham’s seed, because one becomes associated with Christ, who is the Seed of Abraham (v. 29). Since believers are members of Abraham’s seed, (3) they are also ‘heirs according to the promise’ (3:29)”[1]

Throughout this letter, Paul has insisted that God does not play favorites between his children. To put it in more modern terms, his Gentile children will not be treated like Cinderella while his Jewish children are favored with special blessings. Faith in Christ gives them equal seating around God’s table. The Jewish people may be biological descendants of Abraham, but Gentile believers who are “in Christ” are also brought into his line. What does this mean? Unlike in the Jewish and Roman world, it wasn’t just free, first-born males who were heirs. All God’s children are his heirs. But heirs have to grow up first before they can inherit.

Recall that in our passage last week, Paul talked about the law being a guardian. I included a quote from N.T. Wright where he used the word “babysitter” instead of guardian. The verses we are looking at today show us why he picked that particular world. In some sense, Israel was like a young heir. Because they had not fully grown up, they were under the guardianship of the law, and therefore a slave to the law. Remember the law also revealed sin, and by doing so was an instrument of judgment that trapped those under it.

Gentiles were likewise trapped and needed to “grow up” before they could be heirs. Paul says that while they were underage, they were enslaved by the stoicheia or “elemental forces” of this world. Scholars debate what exactly Paul means by this. Paul could be speaking of “basic components, such as fundamental principles of learning”[2] Yet, we know that in the pagan religions practiced by gentiles, people revered the elements of nature. “Some Jewish sources directly linked the elements with Greco-Roman gods by observing that some gentiles worshiped the elements,” so Paul may be thinking of “the elements” in 4:3 as something like heavenly bodies, with some presumed link to deities (in gentile minds, if not his own). [3]

Another option is that Paul is speaking of actual supernatural beings. Some early Christians saw demonic forces “behind the astral deities represented by the zodiac, the pagan gods of Greece and Rome, as well as the national and tribal deities who were believed to superintend the political destiny of every distinctive ethnic group in the world.”[4]  So Paul could be speaking of the elemental forces the same way he spoke of “principalities and powers” in Ephesians 6:12.

Regardless of which view we take, Paul’s point is clear. Both Jew and Gentile were trapped under the control of oppressive forces — the law for Jews and “elemental forces” for Gentiles. “It doesn’t have to be this way!” Paul is almost shouting though  out this letter.

Paul doesn’t want the Galatian Christians to go backwards under the dominion of anything, because Christ came to set them free. Free from the law and any other force, they could at last embrace their position as sons and heirs. In Christ, we are no longer slaves, but children of God!

[1] Scot McKnight, Galatians, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 195.

[2] Keener, 326.

[3] Peter Oakes, Galatians, ed. Mikeal C. Parsons, Charles H. Talbert, and Bruce W. Longenecker, Paideia Commentaries on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 135.

[4] Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 299.

Respond

So, if we are heirs of God, what will our inheritance be? What does it mean for you to be an heir of God? Take some time to reflect on that today.

      About the Engage God DailY

      Jesus invites us to know him personally and engage with him daily. Through daily Bible reading and prayer, we can grow in our relationship with him. The Engage God Daily is a daily resource designed to help you better understand the Bible and take you deeper into the concepts taught on Sunday mornings.

      Use this guide to prepare for next Sunday’s teaching. Each day presents a reading, Scripture, and a prayer to help grow in your walk with Christ this week. 

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