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In his letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul was writing to churches in a region called Galatia, located in the central highlands of what is now Turkey. Having taken the gospel to them, he began his letter by saying that he was “astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (Gal 1:6). The gospel he proclaimed was not of human origin, but was received “through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1:12), and the heart of it was that “a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ” (Gal 2:16). For Greek-speaking Galatian converts to Christianity who wondered if they needed to add Jewish religious practices to their new faith in Jesus, this was a transformative insight. After receiving Paul’s letter, they realized that there was “no longer Jew or Greek ... slave or free ... male and female.” Instead, all were “one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).
The letter to the Galatians was world-changing, like a number of other letters through history. According to The Atlantic magazine, some of the most important letters of all time include Abraham Lincoln’s five public letters that bolstered Northern morale and helped the Union to win the Civil War. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” wrote Lincoln in the most famous of these letters. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” In 1939, Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Roosevelt, suggesting that an atomic bomb was possible. Six years later, the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for nonviolent resistance to racism. It became the 20th century’s most influential essay on civil disobedience, and inspired major civil-right’s legislation.
History was changed in significant ways by these letters by Lincoln, Einstein and King, but it was totally transformed by Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Before Paul put pen to papyrus, people were “imprisoned and guarded under the law” (Gal 3:23). The religious laws of the Bible restrained and protected people, preventing them from hurting themselves and others. “The law was our disciplinarian,” said Paul (Gal 3:24), using a word that had a very specific meaning in the first-century Greco-Roman world, one that the Galatians would have known. The disciplinarian (Greek paidagogos) was a slave who supervised and guarded children, taking them to school and back while keeping them safe and overseeing their behavior.
The protective custody of the disciplinarian was important but temporary, since the slave’s services would no longer be needed once the children grew up. Paul said that we were guarded under the law “until faith would be revealed” (Gal 3:23) — in particular, until the faith of Jesus Christ would be revealed. People certainly had faith in God for many centuries, but history really changed when Christ faithfully suffered death and rose to new life. The “law was our disciplinarian until Christ came,” wrote Paul, “so that we might be justified by faith” (Gal 3:24). Once Christ came, there was no more disciplinarian and no more requirement for being justified — being made right with God — except faith. The faith of Christ is important here, because it is Christ’s faithful death and resurrection that bring God’s love into the very center of human life. But our own faith has a role to play as well, as we say yes to what God has done by putting our trust in Jesus. Now that “faith has come” — Christ’s faith and our faith — “we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian” (Gal 3:25).
So what is the result of being justified by faith? For Paul, it meant that all followers of Christ are now “children of God” (Gal 3:26). Until he wrote to the Galatians, the term “children of God” had been reserved for God’s chosen people, the Jews, and it naturally applied also to the first Jewish followers of Jesus. But now, “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith” (Gal 3:26): The circumcised as well as the uncircumcised, the keepers of the law as well as those who know nothing of the law, the Jews as well as the Greeks — all are children of God through faith.
Paul’s letter changed the world by giving us a new identity. He wrote, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal 3:27). When we clothe ourselves with Christ, we take on his characteristics and do our best to present him to the world: Showing his grace and his love, speaking his truth, and serving others with his generosity and compassion. Clothed in this way, all of us “are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). “God has destroyed the barriers that divide Gentile and Jew,” says professor of New Testament Frank Matera, “slave and free, male and female, from each other.” This passage from Galatians is one of the Bible’s greatest hits because it gives us a new identity as children of God, based on being one in Jesus and one in faith, regardless of background, condition, and gender. United in this way, we “belong to Christ” and “are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal 3:29).
Questions:
1. What does it mean to you to be justified, made right with God?
2. How is your faith influenced by the faith of Jesus Christ?
3. Where do you see signs of unity (or disunity) in the church today?
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