Answering Faith: A Guide to Galatians With N.t. WrightSampl

In the first seven verses of Galatians 4, Paul distills his theology into sharp focus, again focusing on the language of sonship. ‘Son of God’ is a historically resonant title. We tend now to think of it only as an affirmation of Jesus’s divinity, but all of Paul’s claims about Jesus as the ‘Son of God’ are made of a human Jesus. (This doesn’t deny Jesus’s divinity, it just asserts that divinity wasn’t a Jewish expectation of the Messiah.) ‘Son of God’ picks up on both the Old Testament symbolism of Wisdom as God’s second self and the title given to the Davidic King. In Jesus, these meanings are combined and transcended. By stressing Jesus’s humanity, Paul makes clear to his readers that Jesus is the Son who accomplishes their own sonship, just as Jesus’s faithfulness is the context of their own answering faith.

The metaphors mix confusingly, however. All this back and forth about ‘elements’ is likely picking up a contemporary Jewish interpretation of history wherein the Jewish people saw themselves as living under a time of enslavement. The presence of God had left the temple, yet to return; the people were living under Roman occupation. All of this had been warned in Torah. Paul alludes to Deuteronomy 29 to remind his readers that Israel was under a curse. This allusion would naturally evoke thoughts of Deuteronomy 30, which describes a new age breaking in and lifting that curse. For Paul, that had happened with Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

According to Paul, Jesus’s work on the cross was to nullify the powers that kept Gentiles enslaved and kept Israel in the time of the curse. Now that freedom has come, for Gentile Christians to then adopt the life of Torah would be to signal that nothing new had actually been accomplished. It would be like retroactively re-entering the Deuteronomy 29 curse. Paul is emphatic that the New Age has been ushered in here and now, the sign of which being that the spirit of God has been sent into the collective life of the Jesus-believing community.

Reflection:

How are you tempted to reason your way into a relationship with God rather than recognize the movement of God towards you?

What does the work of the spirit look like in your own life? How is it a confirmation of your status as a Jesus follower? How can you be more attuned to this activity?