Day 2
Lisa Scheffler, author
Listen at bit.ly/EngageGodDaily
When a child reaches an age-appropriate milestone, but then regresses, parents are concerned. When a patient is recovering, but suddenly gets sicker, doctors take notice. It’s not a good thing when positive progress is reversed. We want to keep growing, improving, and advancing.
For Paul, witnessing the Galatian Christians going backwards was tremendously frustrating. They had experienced the freedom found in Christ, but were willing to go back under slavery.
As you read our passage for today, notice the questions that Paul asks.
Read
Galatians 4:8-11
8 Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. 9 But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? 10 You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! 11 I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you.
Why is Paul so frustrated?
Reflect
A lot of scholars see a short break in Galatians after the verses we read today. So, let’s take a moment to review where we are.
This large section of Galatians that ends in 4:11 began at the beginning of chapter 3. Paul began with a strong rebuke and then asked a series of rhetorical questions meant to get the Galatians to “reexamine their experience of God’s miraculous work by his Spirit in their lives.”[1]
- You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? (3:1)
- Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? (3:2)
- Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? (3:3)
Paul ends this section in much the same way — frustrated and trying to get the Galatians to see the tremendous error they are making by trading a Spirit-empowered relationship for slavery under the law and other “forces.” (We discussed this term, stoicheia in Greek, on Day 4 of last week’s EGD if you want to review.)
In Galatians 4:5–7, Paul reminded the Galatians that in the Spirit, they have begun to communicate with God as their Abba, Father (v. 6). Now he asks questions that point to the contrast between their present knowledge of God as his children and their former ignorance of God as slaves.
As commentator Walter Hansen puts in, “The essence of the father-child relationship that they now enjoy is reciprocal knowledge: the Father knows his child; the child knows the Father.” In going back and attempting to adhere to the law, they are rejecting the intimate knowledge of God that the Spirit provides and returning to the slavery they experienced in their former way of life. I think we can understand Paul’s frustration!
N.T. Wright draws a helpful comparison between what the Galatians, under the influence of certain Jewish Christians are doing, and what the ancient Israelites did after following Moses out of Egypt. In both cases God had freed people from slavery. In both cases they want to go back. Wright imagines that “They have had a look at the wide and worrying world of freedom, and they don’t like what they see. They are determined to return once more to the world where life seems safer, more regulated, where you know where you are: in other words, to the life of slavery.”[2]
We can turn to laws and legalism because it feels safer. For some of the Galatian Christians, that meant observing certain religious days in hopes of gaining God’s favor (verse 10). In our modern context, it can be trying to gain God’s favor by consuming only Christian media. The problem is, laws and legalism don’t require us to walk in the Spirit (a topic we’ll get to eventually in Galatians 5). We can substitute the Spirit’s leading by trusting in absolutes spelled out in black and white. But then our faith isn’t about a relationship, but about justifying ourselves by following “the rules.”
The law can become like any other idol or gods that are not gods as verse 8 says. Anything that we rely on more than God or find our identity in more than Christ can become an idol. We commit idolatry if that thing becomes an object of devotion. Slavish devotion to the law is just that, slavery. It can’t bring freedom. Only Christ and the Spirit can.
[1] G. Walter Hansen, Galatians, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), Ga 4:8–11.
[2] Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 49.
Respond
Intimacy with your heavenly Father is far better than following a bunch of strict rules. That makes sense when we read it, but we can still make the same kinds of mistakes that the Galatian Christians made. If our faith becomes all about the “do’s and don’ts” and not about the relationship we have with God through Christ, and by the Spirit, at best we’ve lost focus, and at worst we don’t really know Jesus at all.
Has your faith ever been more about the rules than the relationship? If so, how so? How can the law provide guidance without becoming more important than the relationship you have with your Father?
