No Longer a Slave
No Longer a Slave
Galatians 4.1-11
by William Klock
We didn’t go to the theatre to see very many movies when I was a kid, so when Star Wars came out, it seemed like all my friends saw it before I did. I had Luke Skywalker and C3PO action figures before I’d even seen the movie. My best friend, Derigan, tried to fill me in and gave me a sort of point by point run-down of the plot leading up to Luke shooting his torpedo into the thermal exhaust port and blowing up the Death Star. He got all excited at that point, jumping up, throwing up his hands, and making a big explosion sound. His plot summary didn’t really do anything to get me excited—probably because he was five and it wasn’t a very good plot summary. I was just excited to see Star Wars because everyone who saw it was so excited about it. But when I finally did get to see it, oh wow! People in the theatre cheered when the Death Star blew up. Actually watching the story unfold was thrilling in a way a point-by-point plot summary never could be.
The creed we just recited is—a bit—like my friend Derigan’s point by point plot summary of Star Wars. The bishops and other important people of the church got together in AD 325 and hammered out these key points. They obviously did a better job than a council of five-year-olds could ever have done and it has served the church well for seventeen hundred years as a statement of biblical faith and a bulwark against heresy. But it’s not very exciting. I’ve never heard of anyone hearing the Creed and getting so excited about it that they decided then and there to become a Christian. And that’s because the story has been filtered out of it. The really exciting part is there: The son of God became man, was crucified for our sake, rose again on the third day, and ascended into heaven. Those words “in accordance with the scriptures” hint that there’s more to the story. But boy, “I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and Son…who spoke through the prophets”. As much as all the points are true, it’s not even a plot summary—they stripped the story right out. It’s all true, but it’s not like seeing the actual movie—or in this case hearing that great, ages-spanning story hinted at by those five little words “in accordance with the scriptures”. Because we’ve often left the creed to stand by itself, some people have even got the idea that these key plot points, like the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and the sending of the Holy Spirit, were all later doctrines made up by the church fathers.
We’ll be looking at the first half of Galatians 4 this morning, and Brothers and Sisters, it’s all here—in the first of Paul’s letters, which makes it very likely the very earliest part of the New Testament to be written. And it’s all here: God’s son, born of Mary who died and rose again and the Holy Spirit, too. It’s stated just as clearly as it was by later men like Athanasius or Basil the Great. But here it’s part of the great story Paul is always telling, always drawing on, that’s always there underlying, supporting, and giving shape to his arguments. The story that makes sense of it all. Without it Jesus’ death and resurrection are an awesome special effect like the Death Star exploding, but we won’t know why it’s important. Without the story there’s no reason to stand up and cheer.
So Paul closed Galatians 3, telling us that if we’ve been baptised into the Messiah, we’ve put him on. He’s now our identity. There’s no longer Jew or Greek or slave or free or man or woman—God, through Jesus the Messiah, has just one and only one people. And he said, “If you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s family. You stand to inherit the promise.” These agitators who had infiltrated the Galatian churches were saying that you basically had to first become a Jew to become a Christian and Paul’s saying, “No. Jesus has fulfilled the promises made to Abraham and to his family. If, by faith, you belong to him you are part of that family and an heir of God’s promise. There’s nothing you can add to it.” So now Paul continues in Chapter 4 running along with this metaphor of the heir and the inheritance:
Let me put it like this. As long as the heir—remember how Paul’s been talking about promises and wills and inheritances—As long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave—even if, in fact, he is master of everything. He is kept under guardians and stewards until the time set by his father.
“As long as the heir is a slave…” That’s the cue—especially that word “slave”—that’s the cue that Paul is telling an exodus story. We might miss it, but people in Paul’s world were shaped by Passover and the other Jewish festivals that came out of their exodus from Egypt. And hearing Paul talk of slaves, they knew he was now moving from the story of Abraham to the story of Israel’s exodus and exile and their hope of rescue.
It’s really important that we understand the story the Jews of Paul’s day saw themselves in. In Deuteronomy—the last book of the torah—the Lord had promise that if his people were unfaithful, that if they worshipped other gods, he would exile them—that they would find themselves slaves—as they had been in Egypt—slaves to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone. And that’s just what happened. The people were unfaithful, they were idolatrous, their kings were evil and the Lord raised up Babylon to conquer them and to carry them off into exile. Eventually the Babylonians were, in turn, conquered by the Persians and the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Judea, but nothing was ever the same as it had been. They rebuilt the temple, but the Lord’s presence never returned to it. They continued to live under the rule of foreign pagans and their gods. In Paul’s day Rome just the latest in that long line. And so, they concluded, the exile had never really ended. Israel was still living under the curses of Deuteronomy 27. But that also meant they had hope, because Deuteronomy 30—and the prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel—promised a new exodus, a return from exile—when God would set everything to rights. This is what inspired the zeal of the Pharisees. They tried to bring the holiness of the temple and priesthood into the home and into everyday life. If all Israel would keep the law in full for just a single day, one later rabbi wrote, the Lord would finally come to deliver his people.
Paul puts this story of exile and exodus in terms of a child with a great promised inheritance. His father has appointed a time when his son will receive his inheritance, but until then he lives under guardians and stewards—remember the “babysitter” in Chapter 3?—which leaves him no better off than a slave—even though he is, as Paul puts it, “master of everything”. This is exactly how many of Paul’s fellow Jews saw things. It’s how the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, it’s how the Jewish philosopher Philo saw Israel’s situation in their own day. Abraham’s children had been promised the world, but they were slaves of Caesar and it was Caesar who was instead and to their great consternations “master of everything”. They awaited their inheritance.
So Paul goes on in verse 3:
It’s like this with us. When we were children, we were kept in “slavery” under the “elements of the world”.
Paul says “we”—that means he and his fellow Jews—were promised the world, but they were still children. Paul set this up in Chapter 3 when he wrote about torah being like a babysitter given to keep Israel out of trouble until God was ready to reveal his faithfulness in the Messiah. Paul now takes that metaphor and turns it into another. Being a child under torah is like being a slave. The Jews knew what that meant all too well. Paul says, slaves “under the elements of the world”.
Now this phrase “under the elements of the world” is really difficult to parse out if we aren’t familiar with how people thought in Paul’s day. I think Paul is deliberately using language that works on two levels at the same time. First, the Greek word Paul uses for “elements” usually refers to the elements that make up creation. Think of the periodic table we learned in chemistry. Everything in creation is made up, in one way or another, of those 103 elements. For the ancients it was much simpler, albeit a bit more mystical. They had four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. The Jews knew that these elements were created by God and subject to him, but the pagans worshipped them and made idols out of them and Deuteronomy had promised that if Israel were unfaithful they would be scattered amongst the people and forced to serve those gods of wood and stone. That’s exactly what had happened and it was exactly what was still happening. The covenant curses of torah had subjected them to “the elements of the world”.
But I think Paul is also comparing Israel’s situation under torah—under the law—to a sort of medical diagnosis. People, too, were thought to be composed of these elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and if you were sick—and that could be physically or morally sick—it was because these elements were out of balance. You’d see a doctor, he’d determine how your elements were out of balance, and he’d give you some course of treatment. Interestingly enough, the Greek word for that treatment is the same as the word for law—nomos—and this law would then serve as a paidagogos—the “babysitter” Paul mentioned in Chapter 3—to lead you back to health. So disordered elements are treated by a law that takes on the role of a babysitter. In other words, what Paul is saying is that people—the whole human race—is sick, morally sick. These false teachers that showed up in Galatia have been acting like quack doctors, telling the people that to get themselves in order they need to follow the Jewish law and, like a babysitter it will nurse them back to health. And Paul’s saying that, no, it won’t work. It never did. We’ve been trying it for centuries and the best the law, the best that torah can do is hold the sickness at bay. Becuase, in fact, that’s all it was ever intended to do.
Even then—like a virus slipping through the masks and social distancing—Israel was still sick, incurred the curses of the covenant, and found herself subject to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone. And the gentiles, those pagans, they didn’t even have the law. They openly and shamelessly worshipped the elements and in abusing the stuff of creation they threw creation out of whack. Torah promised life, but it could not bring it on its own and these false teachers were wrong to turn back to it. Paul’s been stressing: God has done what torah never could. He’s given his Son and sent his Spirit. Torah, the law, was a thing of the old evil age—a good thing given by God for that time, but still something for the old evil age—but in Jesus and the Spirit God has inaugurated the age to come. Look at verse 4:
But when the fullness of time arrived, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
Paul’s been reminding us of the original exodus from Egypt, when God rescued his people from a land full of idols so that they could live with him in their midst, so that they could worship and serve him. And he’s been telling that story so that here, as he tells us about the new exodus, we hear the old one echoing behind it. When the fullness of time arrived, he writes. It’s a reminder that Jesus is part of this bigger story—as the creed reminds us when it says “in accordance with the scriptures”. God was moving history and the world and his people to this one point in time. We saw last time, this is what the law, torah, was meant to do: to bring Israel to the point where the Messiah could do his work. But now that that work is done, we have to move forward into the messianic age. There’s no going back.
And so, Paul says, God sent his Son. In the Jewish thought world the king—especially the promised and long-awaited Davidic king—was the son of God. In the Wisdom of Solomon, which Paul probably would have been familiar with, King Solomon uses this kind of language to pray for God to send forth his wisdom “that she may labour at my side, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you”. The idea was that the king wasn’t just working using God’s instructions, but that the King actually embodied, in his thought and action, the personal presence and power of the creator God—like David, a man after God’s own heart. For Paul to refer to the Messiah as the Son of God is to declare him to be both the promised King—that’s what “Messiah” means—and the embodiment of God’s wisdom—sort of God’s second self through whom the world was made. In other words two things are happening in Jesus. First, he is the prophecy-fulfilling King and, second, in him the God of Israel has finally returned to rescue his people.
Too, in saying that God’s sent his Son, Paul wants to underscore that Jesus is God himself. He wasn’t simply a Jew born to Mary whom God adopted and called his son. That’s a perennial heresy as old as the creed that was written to combat it. No, the Son was sent and that means he existed before he took on human flesh to be born of Mary.
And God did all this so that he might redeem—deliver, rescue—his people living under the law. In other words, to give them the divine medicine for the disease the law had been holding at bay and, in doing so, to fulfil his promises and show his faithfulness and to shine forth his glory—so that—we might receive adoption as sons. Paul’s been talking about “we” and “us” so far meaning “we Jews”, but here I think he now opens it up. “We” is now the whole church, Jewish and gentiles believers united as one people in the Messiah.
Here’s how it works. God’s Son is born under the law, in solidarity with and as the representative of his people so that he can give his life, dying the death that they deserved, in order to fulfil the covenant promises that God had made to them. So that God’s sons can truly be God’s sons. The cross and the empty tomb are the supreme display of the faithfulness and glory of the God of Israel and it happens before the eyes of the watching gentiles who have never seen anything like it. They worship gods of wood and stone, gods who are deaf and dumb, and then in the gospel they are confronted with the living God who not only hears and speaks, but loves, and who fulfils his promises—even going so far as to take on our flesh and to die. And the gentiles hear this gospel and fall to their knees in faith before the Son, before the Messiah, and the unbelievable happens: God adopts them, and welcomes them into his presence, calls them his sons and daughters, and makes them full members of this royal priesthood. And even in that he shines forth his glory again as his promise to Abraham to make the nations his inheritance is fulfilled.
But it doesn’t stop there. Look at verses 6 and 7:
And because you are sons, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, calling out “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son! And, if you are a son, you are an heir, through God.
The point of the exodus was always for God to live in the midst of his people. He did that in the tabernacle and then the temple under the old covenant, but that was just a signpost pointing to how he would fulfil his promises in the new covenant. Our being sons of God isn’t just a legal status. It’s real. Just as God sent his Son to lead us, like a new Moses, in this new exodus, he’s also sent his Spirit into our hearts and his Spirit now cries out from within us, “Abba—Papa—Father!” The church as a whole and every individual Christian is made a tabernacle, a temple in which God himself has come to dwell. Paul’s been using the plural “you” so far, but here he drives his point home switching to the singular “you”. If you are a son, if you are a daughter, you are an heir. This is the new life to which all of God’s promises to Israel and to which the whole story was working. It can be tempting to think of the Trinity as some dry and technical doctrine, but Paul shows us the Trinity here in three dimensions, in Technicolor, with THX surround sound as he tells the great story. What that thrilling explosion of the Death Star is to the Star War story when everyone in the theatre cheers, God’s sending of his Son and Spirit to make us his sons and daughters is to the great story of God and his people. It’s the climax of the story when everything finally pays off. The old evil age is finished and God’s new creation is born. We might forget all this when we recite the creed. I’m not suggesting you all cheer in the middle of the creed, but maybe in your head. The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Spirit, they’re not just dry technical doctrines, they’re the culmination of this amazing story of God’s love and of his faithfulness and they show forth his great glory. And they’re all right here in Paul’s letter, in the very earliest part of the New Testament.
We’ve been set free. The Spirit, says Paul, crying out in our hearts to God as Father, is the proof that we are no longer slaves to the elements of the world. This is the medicine that he’s given to finally set us to rights. It’s the proof that we are his sons and daughters and heirs of his promise—because in Jesus and the Spirit the inheritance has been dumped right in our laps by God himself. And yet, somehow, bewilderingly, we forget all of this. That’s what was happening in Galatia. Paul goes on in verses 8-11:
However, at that stage you didn’t know God, and so you were enslaved to beings that, in their proper nature, are not gods. But now that you’ve come to know God—or, better, to be known by God—how can you turn your back again to that weak and poverty-stricken line-up of elements that you want to serve all over again? You are observing days, and months, and seasons, and years! I am afraid for you. Maybe my hard work with you is going to be wasted.
They’re like the Israelites in the wilderness, grumbling to Moses and complaining that they want to go back to Egypt. Well, sort of. It’s actually worse than that, because to demand the gentile believers be circumcised and start observing the old calendar of the torah—well—that’s not so much wanting to go back to Egypt, it’s like denying they’d ever been delivered from Egypt in the first place. Do that, and you’re turning away from the living God who gave his Son and sent his Spirit so that you can go back to the “elements”—to the false gods of wood and stone, back into slavery.
“No,” he says, “you’ve come to know God.” And then Paul pauses and says, “No, better—more accurate—to say ‘to be known by God’.” To know God is the desire of people everywhere. To hear God cut through the silence to speak, even if it’s just to tell us what he wants of us. There’s a prayer from ancient pagan Sumer that was written on a clay tablet and survived the millennia. In it a man cried out to the gods to speak. He was miserable. Everything in his life was going wrong. And so he cried out in desperation. He didn’t know what he’d done to offend the gods. The poor man didn’t even know which god he’d offended, which god to cry out to. His pitiful prayer is the cry of every human heart. To know God and to find mercy. And so we do everything we can think of from ascetic disciplines to mystical practises. We study sacred texts and we pray long and desperate prayers. And Paul reminds us that none of this leads us to God. Instead, God has taken the initiative sending his Son and his Spirit. This is the gospel, this is the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen. In believing this good news and in knowing the presence and power of God’s Spirit, Paul is saying that they (and we) can now say for certain that God knows us and that we know God. There is no desperate cry to unknown gods. God’s own Spirit cries out within us to our loving and merciful Father. Just as the nations watched in awe as God delivered Israel from Egypt in the original exodus, so in this new exodus as God sends his Son and his Spirit, the living God has—to quote Isaiah—“bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations.” He has made himself known in all his great glory.
Brothers and Sisters, trust in this good news. Don’t try to add anything to it. To add anything to it is to deny its power and to go back to the slavery of the old gods. Trust in Jesus. Know the Spirit. And know you are God’s son, you are God’s daughter, his new creation is born in you, and as we live this life he’s given by faith, we witness and proclaim his glory—the power of his holy arm—to the watching world around us.
Let us pray: Almighty God, you have fulfilled your promises in knitting your people together into one communion through the death and resurrection of your Son and the gift of your Spirit. Give us grace that we might be faithful stewards of this good news, holding fast to you by faith alone and showing forth your glory as we live the life of your Spirit. Amen.