The Triumph of Grace
“A Man, Two Women, and Two Babies”
July 23, 2000
This Morning’s Text – Galatians 4:21-31
“Tell me, you who want to be under the Law, do you not listen to the Law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh and the son by the free woman through the promise. This is allegorically speaking, for these women are two covenants: one proceeding from Mount Sinai bearing children who are to be slaves; she is Hagar. Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother. For it is written,
“Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear; break forth and shout, you who are not in labor; for more numerous are the children of the desolate than of the one who has a husband.”
And you brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now also. But what does the Scripture say?
“Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be an heir with the son of the free woman.”
So then, brethren, we are not children of a bondwoman, but of the free woman.”
Begin with acted-out story of Genesis 11-21. Then, read Scripture and pray.
Today’s headlines sometimes have their roots in Biblical events, and this is true of stories many of us followed this week! For a few days now we’ve been reading about the up-and-down, back and forth, off and on progress (or lack thereof) regarding the peace talks at Camp David between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak. Arafat represents the interests of the Palestinians, who seek a homeland in the Middle East. Barak is the Prime Minister of Israel, which for years, nay decades, nay centuries, nay millennia has been an enemy! Peace remains elusive, and is likely to, as long as these perennial antagonists are living side-by-side. The animosities which exist today are but the ongoing antagonisms that began hundreds and hundreds of years before Christ, when the slave woman Hagar and her son Ishmael were at odds with Sarah and Isaac. Ishmael and Isaac are still fighting today!
Paul comes to the conclusion of this section of Galatians by means of an illustration, employing a story from the Old Testament in allegorical fashion as his clinching argument for the gospel of grace. He begins by asking
I. One Final Question – v. 21
“Do you really understand what the Law says?”
Some of the Galatians were on the verge of returning to the same kind of slavery from which they’d come, albeit slavery to the Law of God rather than slavery to the idols whom they had worshipped previously. “If you are really so bent on being under the Law”, Paul asks, “then do you really understand what the Law is saying?” He is trying to get them to read the Bible through the lens of Christ—which is the method which we must adopt today! Everything about the Bible points to Jesus, when understood correctly. Paul is challenging them to justify their position in light of the totality of the Biblical evidence, and not merely upon a cursory reading. Similarly, we have people today who want to pick particular verses out of context in order to justify their own preconceived position; indeed, we all need to guard against just this kind of thing happening in our own lives, for we are all susceptible to baptizing our own beliefs and assuming that we are always right in our understandings. Leon Morris said, “A superficial acquaintance with the Law under the guidance of inspiring leaders is not at all the same thing as a genuine understanding of what the Law teaches and what it demands.” We can “know” enough Bible to be more dangerous than we would be otherwise!
II. One Famous Story – vv. 22-23
“A Man, Two Women, and Two Babies”
Paul spins the story with which we began this morning. He goes to the Old Testament and lays out the story of Sarah and Hagar, of Ishmael and Isaac. It is a story of a gracious God and some imperfect people who manage to mess things up but also to get some things right in the end as well.
For the record, Abraham had more than two sons, but Paul is referring to these two particular sons, one born “according to the flesh” and the other, Isaac, born “through the promise.” What does this distinction mean? Were not both women impregnated through ordinary means? Certainly. Were not both women pregnant for roughly nine months? Yes. And did they not deliver children through the normal means? Indeed. What does it mean that Ishmael was born according to the flesh? It means that he was born as a result of a scheme conceived and carried out without any divine intervention. Sarai got tired of the waiting and figured that she’d better “help God”, and so, in a custom which was societally acceptable at the time, she suggested that Abram attempt to have this child with the help of her servant, Hagar. Isaac, on the other hand, was born 13 or so years later, when Abraham was 100 and Sarah was 90, well past child-bearing years. It was only through the hand of God that this could happen, and yet miraculously and according to God’s promise, it did!
According to ancient law, the status of the mother (slave or free) affected the status of a son. So, Ishmael, the child of a slave, represents slavery in Paul’s understanding, while Isaac represents freedom. To this point, the Judaizers would have little argument with Paul! So what’s your point, Paul? This is where it gets interesting, for Paul now moves to this question: just which of these two sons, the bond or the free, do the Judaizers really take after? With whom do we identify these teachers?
They would have claimed proudly that they were the children of Abraham—though John the Baptist took issue with this assertion. Turn to Matthew 3:7-10, and let’s look at what this “voice crying in the wilderness” had to say to the pious Jews! Jesus agreed with John Baptist—and with Paul! Look at John 8:31-44. Who do the Judaizers really line up with—and who will you Galatians line up with if you continue in this folly of wanting to follow them?
III. One Fresh Interpretation – vv. 24-27
“This is an allegory.”
Now, before we get into Paul’s interpretation of these passages, something bears being said about the nature of faithful Bible interpretation. Paul is employing a method of understanding the Bible which is clearly even for Paul an exception and not at all the norm. He treats these stories of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar as allegories. Now the word “allegory” doesn’t suggest that these events didn’t actually take place; they certainly did. But what he is suggesting is that these literal facts point to a figurative interpretation. He is finding a “deeper meaning” in these passages. This is apparently a tactic that the Judaizers were using frequently, and so Paul dabbles for a moment in this procedure which was in vogue at the time in order to make a point. This is not his normal way of looking at Scripture, though, nor should it be ours!!! There are people today who want to see hidden meanings in Scripture that transcend the normal way we would read the text. One particular teaching that has gained credence in the last 5 years or so involves the so-called “Bible codes”, with the suggestion that there are hidden meanings and predictions in Scripture if we run the text through a computer and look for different sequences of letters and so forth. Perhaps you heard of or even saw the movie “The Omega Code”, which apparently dealt with this kind of thinking.
Truth is that this kind of interpretation of Scripture is fanciful and takes us away from the meat and potatoes of Bible understanding. We need to read the plain text of Scripture and strive to understand and rightly interpret it, and leave off this allegorical type of thinking as a general rule. Paul is using this method in a limited way and, all importantly, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Paul is not finding things that are not there; the Holy Spirit is revealing things to him that clearly are. For Paul to do so is one thing; for us to adopt this approach to Scripture as a primary means of understanding it is a dangerous mistake, for the Bible becomes so much Silly Putty in the hands of the would-be interpreter. You’ve heard the argument that the Bible can be made to say what you want it to? Well, it cannot legitimately be used in this way, but if we adopt a dubious approach to interpreting Scripture, we can arrive at all sorts of fanciful understandings. There are some items in Scripture which at times might point symbolically to other things, but we need even in these instances to make very certain that we draw our analogies from what the Scripture says, and that we don’t invent things of our own making. Sometimes the Holy Spirit is likened to wind or oil, for instance, but we need not imagine that every time in the Bible we see the word “wind” or the word “oil” that we are seeing a reference to the Spirit. Sometimes (probably most of the time!), the wind is just the wind and oil just means greasy stuff!
One more point quickly is this: history is more than just the stuff that happens to happen! This is the prevailing idea in the humanistic-based understanding of the world which is being imparted to many today, notably many of our students in some of our institutions of education. The idea makes sense—if the secularists are right in their cosmology. If there is no God, then what meaning can we possibly assign to history? It is only the stuff that happens to happen! But we understand that there is a God Who got the whole thing kicked off as He sovereignly created all that is. In this case, though, Paul finds a deeper significance in the events described, one which knocks the socks off the Judaizers. This is a little tough to wade through, but let’s do the best we can. Paul is devising two sides (remember our earlier analogies about how every person is ultimately on one side or another in this cosmic game of “Capture the Flag”?), and here is how they line up: (Show overhead)
Hagar Ishmael Mt. Sinai’s Law Jerusalem Slave inhabitants
Sarah Isaac (Calvary) Heavenly Jerusalem Free people
Judaizers would have used this story to show that they, as the physical descendants of Isaac, were part of the covenant, whereas Gentiles were outside the covenant as the sons of the slave woman. But Paul says that the spiritual descendants of the slave woman are those whose only connection to God is one “according to the flesh”. There is nothing supernatural about keeping a bunch of rules! This is a human attempt to get to God by doing things which look humanly good, by conforming to outward standards which ignore the power of God to change us from the inside out!
Rabbinical teachers taught that the earthly Jerusalem was figurative of the heavenly Jerusalem, that the geographic center of the Law corresponded to Heaven. Paul taught that the geographic center of the Law aligned with Hagar and her slave-born son Ishmael, for the Law binds us into slavery. “Jerusalem above” is called a mother, for those who belong to it owe their spiritual existence to it. Jerusalem above is our mother! We are born of the Spirit of God, supernaturally, through Christ. The progeny of the Jerusalem which is above does not depend upon natural development or exertion, but on the divine miraculous power which grants life when it seems impossible. It is a power that knocks down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, and establishes in its place a radically different dividing line, a line between freedom and slavery, on the basis of the difference between the gospel of grace & faith as opposed to the false gospel of faith plus the keeping of the Law!
Verse 27 quotes Isaiah 54:1 and Paul refers to Sarah as the one who is desolate, as opposed to the one who “has a husband”, which in this case, this turn of events, would refer to Hagar, in the sense that she conceived on the basis of a natural, normal human experience. These children of the desolate woman would eventually outnumber the children born into slavery of Hagar, and this has taken place: there are many more children of Abraham spiritually than there are physically (“Father Abraham had many sons…).
IV. One Forceful Application – vv. 28-31
“Cast out the bondwoman and her son.”
So what does this mean for the Galatians, and for us?
A. “You are children of promise, not children born after the flesh.” - :28, 31
Paul continues to maintain that these Galatians have been born again into the family of God, that they are brothers and sisters in Christ despite their flirtation with the Judaizers. They have not gone off the deep end, and their salvation is secure in Christ, because they have been truly born again by the Spirit of God.
This is the dividing line, the thing that sets us apart: we have been born again by the Spirit, supernaturally! The Judaizers were saying, effectively, change your conduct and you can be the children of promise; Paul stands that on its head (as we’ll see in weeks to come) and says that the fact that they are already children of promise will change their conduct! It’s a supernatural operation, an inward job, rather than a fleshly self-effort to right their own ships!
B. “The treatment that the Judaizers are giving you amounts to persecution.” - :29
Being born in the Spirit is a true blessing, but it is not an unmixed blessing, for the Judaizers are persecuting any who dared to stand up to them and suggest that they were accounted righteous before God on the basis of faith alone. Just as Ishmael thumbed his nose at Isaac, so the religion crowd will thumb its nose often at those who are true believers. This has been the case throughout history; the religious (the ½ brothers, if you will) are often (though not always, of course) the ones who most vigorously persecute those who are true believers! The Bible speaks of how in the end days, people will have a “form of godliness, but will deny its power.” Religious people are making headlines today, but in some cases for the vitriol and hatred that they spew at believers (and to our shame, we sometimes repay them in kind, to our detriment). A group of “ministers” linked arms at the national meeting of the UMC this summer in Cleveland; they would not allow people through into the convention hall. Why? They were ostensibly standing up for the rights of homosexuals to be “married” within Methodist churches. I’m sure they imagine themselves brave and principled. They are brave and principled all right; they stood boldly for the right to cower meekly and capitulate to the spirit of the times! But they will save their most intense hatred for people who believe in the truth of the Word! The very existence of people who believe in absolute truth and in the Word is a terrible affront for these folks, and they will sometimes stop at nothing to eradicate this belief from the earth!
Now I’m not suggesting that the “persecution” which we are facing today, though it is clearly intensifying, is anywhere near what our brothers and sisters have faced through the centuries. Still, whenever we are opposed for either obeying God or for declaring His will and His truth, we find ourselves in good company with saints of the ages, many of whom paid for their faith with their lives.
What do the Galatians do with false teachers? Paul makes it clear: negotiate. Right? Seek common ground. Is that what he says? Compromise. Give a little and take a little, and find the middle point. NO, a thousand times, no!
C. “You must get rid of these false teachers.” - :30
Just as Sarah said, “Get rid of this bondwoman; she has no inheritance with my son”, so our place is to not allow false teaching to stand unchallenged, to penetrate the church, to destroy the faith of people! The solution is neither negotiation, compromise, or surrender; it is separation! There is a whole group of Christian people who, when you talk about separation, define that in almost strictly outward terms. I want to say that this may have its place to a point, but much more importantly is a separation that gets away from the world and its values and insists on living by the principles of the truth of God’s Word!
There are two sides, Paul has made clear, and not only for the Galatians, but for all of us, we must be clear which side we are on. Are you on the side of the rescued, those who are truly free for they have been freed from their chains by the supernatural power of the gospel, or are you on the side of those who believe that they must prove to God their worth in order for God to let them into Heaven?
I close with a quote from William Barclay. He says that, when the Law is central (as it was for the Judaizers), a person is in the position of a slave. It doesn’t matter the rest of a person’s pedigree; he is a slave, and all his life he will seek to satisfy the Law through his own efforts. The Law becomes a cruel taskmaster, always demanding perfect obedience, but never delivering peace and salvation. But when grace is central, love becomes the dominant principle. It then is the power of love—love for God and for others—and not the constraints of the Law, which keeps us right—and love is more powerful than Law!
