Two Covenants
Gal. 4:21-5:1
Introduction
In this text Paul continues to contrast grace and law, faith and works. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit he employs an Old Testament story as an analogy, which serves not so much as an argument as an illustration.
Paul here doesn’t give us a explanation of why, after the powerful and irrefutable arguments he has already given, to know chose allegory as a means of further persuasion.
Allegory as such is a shaky and dangerous means of interpretation. Because allegory does not need to be based on fact, it is limited only by an interpreter’s imagination and is easily influenced by his personal predispositions. It frequently leads to biased and often bizarre conclusions.
The ancient rabbis regularly used an allegorical approach to interpret Scripture, often claiming to discover amazing, hidden, and extremely fanciful “truths” that supposedly lay behind the ordinary meaning of the words of a text. During the last several centuries before Christ, Jewish scholars in Alexandria developed a system of scriptural allegory that strongly influenced not only Judaism but also Roman Catholicism until the time of the Protestant Reformation. For example, the Euphrates River was seen as the out flowing of good manners. The journey of Abraham from Ur to the Promised Land pictured a stoic philosopher who left his sensual understandings and came to his spiritual senses.
Allegory is a Pandora’s Box that ignores the literal, historical meaning of Scripture and opens biblical interpretation to every extreme. Because of man’s infiniteness and fallenness, it inevitably leads to arbitrariness, absurdity, and futility.
The Holy Spirit here directs Paul to use analogy on this occasion in order to show the Judaizers that God’s plan of redemption has always been by grace. As Paul develops the analogy, he first gives its historical background, then its divine interpretation, and finally its personal application.
I. The Historical Background (vv. 22-23)
• Paul first reminds his readers of their forefather Abraham, beginning of the Hebrew race.
o It was in their racial descent from him that most Jews of Paul’s day placed their trust for salvation.
o If I am related to Abraham, then I am saved, they believed.
• Paul’s first historical reminder to them about Abraham was that he had two sons.
o The sons were distinct in a number of ways: they had different mothers
o One was a bondwoman (Hagar) who bore Ishmael.
o One was a free woman (Sarah) who bore Isaac.
• Throughout Paul’s analogy, all distinctions between the two sons are based on the fact that they have different mothers, not on the fact that they had a common father.
o The heritage of the line through one mother is lostness and bondage
o The heritage of the line through the other mother is salvation and freedom.
• Paul’s second historical reminder was that the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise.
o The birth of Ishmael through Hagar was according to the flesh, not because it was physical but because the scheme for his conceptions, devised by Sarah and carried out by Abraham, was motivated by purely selfish desires.
o The birth of Isaac however, the son by the free woman Sarah, was through the promise of God.
• The conception of Ishmael represents man’s way, the way of the flesh, whereas that of Isaac represents God’s way, the way of promise.
o Ishmael symbolizes those who have had only natural birth and who trust in their own works.
o Isaac symbolizes those who also have had spiritual birth because they have trusted in the work of Jesus Christ.
II. The Divine Interpretation (vv. 24-27)
• Paul here specifically states that his present illustration is an analogy.
• Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the apostle explains that these women, the bondwoman Hagar and the free woman Sarah, are illustrations of two covenants.
• The two mothers and the two sons lucidly and graphically represent two covenants.
• Hagar and Ishmael represent the covenant of the law and works
• Sarah and Isaac represent the covenant of grace and faith.
• The Old Covenant of law was given through Moses at Mount Sinai and required God’s chosen people, the Jews, to keep all the commands He gave in conjunction with that covenant.
• Because the terms of the covenant were humanly impossible to keep, it produced a type of religious slaves, as it were, bound to a master from whom they could never escape.
• Anyone, who attempted to satisfy God and gain freedom from condemnation by trying to live up to that covenant in his own self-righteousness was spiritually like a child of Hagar, the bondwoman.
• He was a slave, struggling for a freedom he could not obtain by his own efforts.
• The descendants of Hagar through Ishmael eventually moved into the desert areas to the east and south of the Promised Land.
• They came to be known broadly as the Arabs and their territory as Arabia.
• What is significant is that Mount Sinai is right in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula.
• It was between the sons of Hagar and Sarah that the modern Arab-Israeli animosity began 4,000 years ago, producing a continual conflict between two peoples who both trace their lineage from Abraham.
• Paul goes on to explain that Mount Sinai in Arabia corresponds to the present Jerusalem.
• Both Mount Sinai and Jerusalem are commonly associated with Jews, not Arabs, but a major emphasis throughout the letter to Galatia is that historical, geographical, racial, social, and all other superficial distinctions among men have no spiritual significance.
• On the spiritual level, one’s identity as Jew, Gentile, Arab, or whatever makes no difference.
• The spiritual descendants of Sarah through Isaac, on the other hand, live in the Jerusalem above and are free, if we are among those who live by faith in God’s gracious promise, fulfilled through Christ.
• The inhabitants of the heavenly Jerusalem are free from law, from works, from bondage, and from the flesh.
• Before coming to Christ, a person is free to do virtually whatever he wants that is wrong, but he is not free to do anything that is right in God’s sight.
• The Holy Spirit not only delivers the believer form sin but enables him, for the first time, to do what is right.
• John 8:36, Jesus said, “If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”
• Paul in verse 27 quotes Isaiah 54:1.
• Those words were originally written to cheer up the Jewish exiles in Babylon but are here applied to Sarah, the barren woman whose barrenness seemingly stood as an impenetrable barrier to the fulfillment of God’s promise to her husband, Abraham.
• Just as freedom and greater fruitfulness came to those in exile in Babylon, it will also come to the people in captivity to the law and its death penalty.
• In one sweep Paul set forth the common factor of divine power in behalf of Sarah, the captive Jews, and the church.
• The common element of all three is divine power granting freedom and fruitfulness.
• Everything is a result of regenerating grace, not human effort.
III. The Personal Application (vv. 4:28-5:1)
• Paul here in this last section, once again addresses the Galatian believers are brethren, telling them that, like Isaac, they are children of promise.
• Those who have begun to sink back into the trap of the legalistic Judaizers must remember that they are children of promise, who owe their life to the power of God, not their own doing.
• If they were to continue to fall back under the law, was the same as denying the divine work of God and to dishonor God.
• Paul in verses 29-5:1 mentions three results of being a spiritual Isaac, a redeemed child of promise through Sarah.
• First – Expect persecution by the spiritual descendants of Ishmael (the flesh).
• Back in Gen. 21:9 when Abraham was holding a feast to celebrate Isaac’s weaning, Ishmael mocked the occasion.
• He hated Isaac, just as his mother Hagar hated Sarah.
• It is still the same today.
• Throughout history the physical and spiritual descendants of Hagar and Ishmael have, respectively, opposed and persecuted the physical and spiritual descendants of Sarah and Isaac.
• Those who hold to salvation by works, trusting in their own performance of the law, hate those who proclaim salvation by grace without works.
• Whether its Judaism or Christianity, legalists have always been persecutors.
• Those who trust in God have always been persecuted by those who trust in themselves.
• Second – They will receive an inheritance.
• In the end the persecutors are going to be thrown out, and the persecuted will receive their promised and rightful inheritance.
• Just like Hagar and Ishmael were thrown out of Abraham’s household, the unbelieving will be thrown out of God’s household.
• No one outside the covenant of grace will receive anything from God.
• Third – we are brethren in Jesus Christ
• We are children of a bondwoman, but of a free woman
• Those we have an obligation to live faithfully for God.
Closing
In light of what Paul has been saying throughout the letter, he ends this section of text with a disturbing question of sorts, which I believe is a good closing question for us here today as well: “Why, then, do some of you want to go back to being like Ishmael, who was a slave, an outcast, and separated from God?”
