Cast Out the Slave-girl and her Son
Cast Out the Slave-girl and her Son
Galatians 4:12-5:1
by William Klock
I have a non-Christian—or it would be better to say, anti-Christian—relative who, I’ve observed, is very uncomfortable with me being a preacher. At one point she just came out and said it: As far as she’s concerned, preachers are just moralising, kill-joy demagogues who glory in lording their authority over people and pontificating to them what they can and cannot do. People like this think of God as a kill-joy in the sky and the preacher as his sour and spiteful earthly representative. She has no clue that the preacher is the intermediary between the loving God who has given his word to make himself known and his people, filled with his Spirit, who desire to hear his word that they might know him and love him in return. They have no idea that both the Bible and preaching sit at the intersection of God’s love for his people and his people’s love for him. But it’s not just non-Christians. Even people in the church forget that God speaks—and he tells us what he expects of us—out of love and they forget that the preacher preaches that word out of love, too. And so they get angry when they hear things they don’t like. Sometimes they get angry with God and leave the church entirely. Sometimes they just shoot the messenger—the preacher. And that’s where Paul is at as we come to the middle of Galatians 4. Paul knew the people in the Galatian churches well. He loved them as brothers and sisters in the Lord. And he’s deeply troubled by what he’s heard has been going on there ever since these agitators had arrived. This is why he’s writing to them. And so far he’s mostly been talking theology—explaining why these people urging them back into torah are undermining the gospel, the good news about Jesus. And he’s been building this argument as he’s walked them through the biblical story, walked them through God’s covenants with his people, walked them through the significance of what Jesus did when he died and rose again. And he’s about to finally make the point he’s been working toward. He’s about to tell them what they need to do in light of all this. But in verses 11-20 he pauses and he takes a breath and he reminds them who he is. He reminds that he’s not only their friend, but that he’s their brother in the Lord who loves them—and that that’s why he’s taking the trouble to say all of this. Look at Chapter 4, beginning at verse 12.
Brothers [and Sisters], become like me! Because I became like you. You did me no wrong. No, you know that it was through bodily weakness that I announced the gospel to you in the first place. You didn’t despise or scorn me, even though my condition was quite a test for you, but you welcomed me as if I were God’s angel, as if I were Messiah Jesus! What’s happened to the blessing you had then? Yes, I can testify that you would have torn out your eyes, if you’d been able to, and given them to me. So have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?
Become like me, because I became like you. These Christians were mostly gentiles. Paul was a Jew. But as he would later write to the Corinthians, he has become like all things to everyone. Knowing that the gospel unified them as one in Jesus and the Spirit, Paul came and fellowshipped with them—he prayed and sang and worshipped and ate with them, despite their ethnic differences—which is something that can’t be said of these false teachers. And Paul reminds them of when he first arrived. We don’t know exactly what the problem was, but it sounds very much like he arrived in Galatia bloody and beaten after preaching the good news in some neighbouring city. This might be what he was referring to when he said the brutality of the cross had been shown to them. He’d stumbled into their fellowship having very nearly shared Jesus’ crucifixion—and they welcomed him. That would have been a dangerous thing to do. Harbouring a man who had been in trouble another town over could have brought the local authorities down on them. It sure wouldn’t have looked good to the community around them. But they welcomed Paul and took care of him as he regained his strength. In the meantime, he proclaimed Jesus and the good news in his weakness. And they received Paul and his message as if he were an angel, a messenger from God—practically as if he’d been Jesus himself.
“So now,” Paul asks, “what’s happened to that welcome? Back then you knew my love for you and you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me if you’d thought it would help. But now I’ve told you the truth—because I love you—and you’re treating me like an enemy.” Now he goes on in verse 17:
Those other folks are zealous for you, but it’s not in a good cause.
False teachers are often full of zeal. Enough so that they con good Christians into thinking that they’ve got the truth. And then those conned Christians lash out when the pastor who loves them comes along to show them how the false teachers are wrong. It happens over and over and over. Paul says:
They want to shut you out, so that you will then be zealous for them.
Paul has the temple in mind, with its segregated courts. Jews could go into the temple court, but gentiles were stuck outside. They couldn’t go in. And these agitators, these false teachers are trying to make the Galatian churches like that. The Jewish believers can come into church, they can eat at the Lord’s Table, but the gentiles are stuck outside until they get circumcised and start living according to torah. So Paul says,
Well, it’s always good to be zealous in a good cause, and not only when I’m there with you. My children, I seem to be in labour with you all over again, until the Messiah is fully formed in you. I wish I were there with you right now, and could change me tone of voice. I really am at a loss about you.
Paul knew all about being zealous. He’d been zealous for torah and he’d been zealous for persecuting Christians. And then he’d met the risen Jesus and now he’s zealous for the gospel. Zeal isn’t the point. You can be zealous for anything. So don’t be taken in by the zealousness of false teachers and a false gospel. And we get a sense of how Paul loves these people and, because of that, how he’s so exasperated. He thought they knew all of this. He’d laboured over the gospel with them before, but now it feels like he’s got to labour with them over the gospel all over again, because it’s obvious they weren’t as mature in the gospel—in the Messiah—as he had thought.
It happens. Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on the door and they’ve got carefully worked out arguments that fool far too many Christians. Prosperity hucksters will tell you they’ve got the “full gospel” and they’ll back it up with great zeal. In our own day we’ve got various Messianic groups or the Adventists with a false gospel rooted in the same errors Paul confronted in Galatia. They dupe Christians into their false teaching and, apart from praying for such people, all we can really do is confront false teaching with gospel truth. That’s what Paul does here. Look at verse 21:
So you want to live under the law, do you? All right, tell me this: are you prepared to hear what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave-girl and one by the free woman. Now the child of the slave-girl was born according to the flesh, while the child of the free woman was born according to promise.
Do you recognise the story Paul’s talking about? He’s going back to Genesis 16. This is after God’s promise to Abraham, but before the birth of Isaac. Abraham and Sarah trusted the Lord. They believed he would provide a son to inherit the promise, but from their perspective a natural heir was impossible. Sarah was an elderly woman and elderly women past their child-bearing years don’t bear children. So they followed the custom of the day. Abraham took Sarah’s slave-girl, Hagar, as his concubine and had a child by her. Because she was Sarah’s slave, the child was legally hers.
But, if you know the story, you know the plan backfired. When Hagar became pregnant, she lorded it over Sarah. In their culture, for a woman to be barren was a great shame and Hagar made sure that Sarah felt that shame. Sarah, of course, wasn’t going to stand for that, so she mistreated Hagar. Hagar ran away, but in the wilderness the Lord met her and sent her back and she gave birth to Ishmael. Years later—as if the Lord was really, really wanting to make a point to Abraham and Sarah that with him anything was possible—years later, when Sarah was even more elderly, she became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac. Sarah became jealous of Ishmael and we have a cryptic text about Ishmael abusing Isaac, so Sarah banished Hagar and her son from the camp. Ishmael would become the father of the Arabian tribes and Isaac would became the father of Jacob, who became the father of the Hebrew tribes—of Israel.
It’s possible Paul brings this up because the false teachers might have been telling this story in their own way, as if to say, “See…Abraham has two families. You gentiles might have believed the gospel, but since the Jews are the free children of Abraham, you’re like Ishmael and his sons. If you want to really be part of Abraham’s family, you’re going to have to get circumcised and become a Jew. Paul has heard this before and says, “No. You’ve got it backwards and here’s why. Let’s suppose that Abraham does have two families. How can you tell which one is the slave family and which one is the free family? Well, look at the story. Ishmael was born according to the flesh. He was the result of Abraham taking matters into his own hands. Isacc, on the other hand, was born miraculously and in fulfilment of the Lord’s promise.
And now we see why Paul has been talking so much about covenants and inheritances and heirs all this time. This is where he’s been going with it. In verse 24 he goes on:
Think of this allegorically—as picture-language. These two women stand for two covenants: one comes from Mount Sinai and gives birth to slave children—that’s Hagar. (Sinai, you see, is a mountain in Arabia, and it corresponds, in the picture, to the present Jerusalem, since she is in slavery with her children.) But the Jerusalem which is above is free—and she is our mother.
All you have to do is follow the theme of promise through the story. Well, that and you have to recognise that the story is ongoing. The false teachers were telling the story as if it stopped with Abraham—or maybe with Moses—but Paul has been showing how the Abraham story, the story of a promise and a family and an inheritance that encompasses the whole world—Paul has been showing how that story is still going on. So they were right to see the promise back in the story of the birth of Isaac, but now Paul’s sort of urging them on: Yes, yes. You’ve got that part right, but keep following the promise through the rest of the story. Because Jesus changes everything. And so, sure, Isaac was the child of God’s promise and so were his children and their children and eventually the whole people of Israel. But before his little break to remind them that he’s not their enemy, Paul was also pointing out how the law, how torah was only meant to serve the promise family for a time—between Moses and the Messiah. Remember, the human race is sick. Israel had the same sickness, but the law held the sickness at bay until the promise could be fulfilled. Or, Paul used the illustration of a babysitter, keeping the promise family out of trouble until the promise to them could be fulfilled. And, that means, Paul has said, that as much as the law was a good thing given by God for a time, it kept the Israelites as slaves until the Messiah came. So the law, he’s saying here, the law if left to itself can never set people free. The law, ironically, makes Ishmael children, not Isaac children.
And then Paul adds this sort of parenthetical statement: For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia. And his point is that—using this allegorical or picture language—the law of Moses, which was given on Mount Sinai, now represents the people, the family on the outside in the original picture. As much as the Lord’s promise once led his people to Mount Sinai where he gave them his law, the story has moved on in Jesus the Messiah and so Hagar—the mother of Abraham’s son according to the flesh—Hagar now corresponds to Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai represents the law, torah, that the false teachers are saying the gentile believers have to keep.
So Isaac represents the promise and freedom. Ishmael represents the flesh, slavery…none of which would have been controversial, but now Paul has also shown that Ishmael also represents Mount Sinai and the law. Again, we’ve got to follow the promise all the way through the story to Jesus and then to the present. The law was part of God’s provision for his people during the present evil age, but the Messiah has inaugurated the age to come. So Paul’s now ready to bring the false teachers into this. They’ve been appealing to some authority figures in Jerusalem—maybe James, but we really don’t know—just that they’re in Jerusalem. And Paul, in verses 25 and 26 is saying, “Okay, but they’re talking about the present Jerusalem, not the heavenly Jerusalem, not the “Jerusalem above”, which is the home of all real believers and the true people of the promise. To make his point he quotes Isaiah 54:1 which is addressed to Jerusalem herself:
For it is written:
Celebrate, childless one, who never gave birth!
Go wild and shout, girl that never had pains!
The barren woman has many more children
Than the one who has a husband!
In Isaiah’s day, Jerusalem was laid waste, but through the prophet the Lord gave hope to his people. One day Jerusalem would be restored. He put it in terms of a barren woman—like Sarah—finally knowing the joy of bearing children and having a family. By Paul’s day this had become an image of the age to come, when the Lord would return to his people and the heavenly city would come with him, heaven and earth would be rejoined, and his new age would dawn. So the Jerusalem above—the promise of God’s new age—it was barren, but now through the Messiah it’s bearing children. The promises are being fulfilled. In contrast, the present Jerusalem—the city the false teachers are appealing to as their authority—it’s got children, yes, but they’re in slavery. In fact, the earthly Jerusalem is slated for judgement and destruction. So now Paul goes on in verse 28:
Now you, my brothers [and sisters], are children of promise, in the line of Isaac.
Follow the promise. It has passed from Isaac to Jesus and now to these people—even though they’re gentiles—because they have trusted in the Messiah. Jesus-believers, uncircumcised as they may be, are Sarah-children, new-Jerusalem people, Isaac-people, promise-people. But, Paul goes on:
But things now are like they were then. The one who was born according to the flesh persecuted the one born according to the spirit.
Genesis doesn’t elaborate on what Ishmael did to Isaac, only that he abused him in some way, and Paul’s point here is that this is how the children of the flesh are always liable to treat the children of the promise. It sounds as though the unbelieving Jews were actively persecuting the Christians in Galatia—angry at them because they claimed the “Jewish exemption” from pagan worship, but didn’t live as Jews. But Paul lumps the false teachers, these people who say they believe in Jesus the Messiah, but also insist on the gentiles being circumcised—Paul lumps that in with the abuse of the unbelieving Jewish community. The false teachers stand in sharp contrast to Paul. Even though Paul has had some sometimes harsh words for the Galatians, he loves them like a father. He’s speaking gospel truth. The false teachers, for all their zeal, don’t really love the Galatians—not if they’re trying to drag them back into slavery under the law. And with that, Paul’s ready to drive his point home, he’s ready to tell them what they have to do. Look at verse 30:
But what does scripture say? “Throw out the slave-girl and her son! For the son of the slave-girl will not inherit with the son of the free.” So my brothers [and sisters], we are not children of the slave-girl, but of the free.
Do what Sarah did: cast out the slave girl and her son. In other words, cast out the false teachers before they drag you away from Jesus and the promise and back into slavery. At this point there’s a chapter break, but I really think Paul meant for verse 1 of Chapter 5 to be the close of this paragraph, because it’s not easy to cast out false teachers. And so Paul continues there:
The Messiah set us free so that we could enjoy freedom! So stand firm, and don’t get yourselves tied down by the chains of slavery.
Stand firm and don’t let anyone take you back into slavery with a false gospel, because Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has set us free. Paul doesn’t mess around with false teachers. Jesus died and he rose again, he is Lord, and he has fulfilled all of God’s promises. Paul saw the promise fulfilled as the gentiles were forgiven, filled with the Spirit, and swept up into this great story of God and his people and he was outraged at the idea that anyone might come along and drag these people back into slavery.
In contrast, how often is our tendency to be wishy-washing about false teaching. People come in the name of Jesus, but end up proclaiming false gospels—or things that undermine the gospel. They’ll say, for example, that there are other ways to God and other ways to be good and other ways to enter the age to come and in doing that they undermine the work of Jesus and the Spirit no less than the false teaching in Galatia did by trying to add torah to the gospel. Others come into the church and tell us that Jesus isn’t enough and that we’ve got to do something extra to receive the Spirit. Others these days come preaching post-modern ideas of identity that undermine our identity in the Messiah and our unity in him. And we equivocate on what to do about them. Instead of dealing with the false teachers we quibble with each other over whether or not the false teachers are truly believers or not—as if we need to treat them differently if the false teaching isn’t so bad as to rule them out as real Christians. Paul does the opposite here. The false teachers in Galatia believed in Jesus. They believed in his death and resurrection. But they added something that ultimately undermined that good news. And so Paul says to cast them out. Get them out of the church. Just as he did with the man sleeping with his step-mother in Corinth. Get them out. Maybe that will get them thinking hard about what they’ve done or what they’re teaching and they’ll repent and come back, but that’s not the first priority. Get them out, because their teaching undermines the gospel itself and if it’s allowed to fester, the church will cease to be the church. The promise will be lost. The false teaching will make us slaves again. If the Anglican Communion had cast out the false teachers a hundred years ago, our generation wouldn’t have had to face the difficulties we have. The church can’t fool around with false teachers and false gospel. But the flip side of this imperative is that we as Jesus’ people need to work hard for unity with our brothers and sisters who do believe the good news about Jesus. This was the vision of Bp. Cummins when he called together the men and women who would found the Reformed Episcopal Church. All baptised and believing Jesus-followers are, in fact, one family and we need to do our best, despite our various differences on other things, to live as the one family that Jesus has made us. I think Galatians has something to say about how we distinguish which of our differences are demand separation and which don’t. Does the message being preaching point forward to the age to come, or like the Galatian heresy, does it drag us back to the darkness of the old evil age? If it undermines or undoes what has been accomplished by God in Jesus and the Spirit, we must cast it out. Standing firm against false gospels while standing just as firm for the unity of God’s gospel people is no easy task—especially as things are today—but Brothers and Sisters it is our calling. It is what honours God, it is what honours Jesus and the Spirit, and it is what witnesses to the world the new creation that has been born in us.
Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, make us mature in the Messiah so that we will be able to discern truth from error, and fill us with zeal for your gospel truth, so that we will stand firm—not afraid to cast out false teachers and false teaching, but also zealous for the unity that Jesus and the Spirit bring to your church, that we might be effective witnesses of the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, and of his kingdom, the new Jerusalem. Through him we pray. Amen.