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§14 Why Gentile Christians Should Not Follow the Law (Gal. 3:10–18)

3:10 / Paul now turns to a direct attack on following the law. He takes the tack that following the law is a denial of the truth of the gospel, and those who rely on observing the law are under a curse. Citing the curse from Deuteronomy 27:26, which ends a series of curses and precedes a list of blessings, Paul characterizes as under a curse those who are “of works of law” (the literal translation of the phrase “observing the law”).

In one way Paul’s use of Deuteronomy respects the passage’s intention: the passage does promise a curse for those who do “not uphold the words of this law by carrying them out” (Deut. 27:26). Paul understands full well that the intention of the Jewish lifestyle is to fulfill the entire law. When he states in 5:3 that “every man who lets himself be circumcised … is obliged to obey the whole law,” he demonstrates his grasp of the situation.

In another way, however, Paul’s use of the passage is at odds with its function in Deuteronomy. Whereas the Deuteronomy passage functions to encourage obedience to the law, Paul uses it to warn against law observance. The result of becoming a full proselyte through circumcision means accepting the proposition that not observing the law (to which one is now committed) is to be under a curse.

This verse contains the first of four scriptural quotations arranged in a chiastic structure. The first and fourth (3:13) have parallel language, as do the second (3:11) and third (3:12).

3:10 cursed is everyone (who does not obey the law)

3:11 (the righteous) will live (by faith)

3:12 (the man who follows the law) will live (by the law)

3:13 cursed is everyone (who is hung from a tree)

The semantic effect of the chiastic arrangement of the scriptural quotations is to move from speaking of the law’s curse on those who do not fulfill the obligations of the law (3:10) to the law’s statement that the righteous one is the one who lives by faith (3:11) to the problem that the law requires those who participate in law to live by works of law (3:12) to the solution that Christ provided redemption from the curse by becoming a curse (3:13).

The fact that there is so much Scripture in this passage suggests that Paul is countering the use the troublemakers had made of these Scriptures. It is easy to see how at least three of the four scriptural quotations (Deut. 27:26; Lev. 18:5; Deut. 21:23) could have been put to good use by the rival evangelists.

3:11 / When Paul states clearly no one is justified before God by the law his evidence is not phenomenological. That is, he does not cite the evidence of his or others’ experience. Rather, Paul cites Scripture: “The righteous will live by faith.” There are few other places where we see Paul the exegete so hard at work. Paul’s argument does not rest on an assumption that humans find it impossible to fulfill the law. Rather, Paul’s argument is based on the assumption that Scripture has something to say to the problem at hand, on the conviction that he rightly understands what it says, and on the desire to discredit whatever his opponents may have said on the basis of these Scriptures.

Paul is faced with the challenge of a seeming contradiction in Scripture. N. Dahl’s suggestion makes good sense of Paul’s use of Scripture in this passage. According to Dahl, Paul here uses legal arguments common among rabbis who sought to deal with contradictions in Scripture. When they were confronted with contradictory scriptural passages the rabbis sought to determine which passage held the basic principle that would serve to set the other passage in context. Paul sees an opposition between Habakkuk 2:4 (“the righteous will live by faith”) and passages such as Deuteronomy 27:26 and Leviticus 18:5 (“the man who does these things [i.e., observing the law] will live by them”). Dahl proposes that the way Paul resolves the contradiction is to determine that the valid principle is “by faith” (Gal. 3:13–14). This means that the other scriptural principle, “by law,” is provisional (Gal. 3:15–19; “Contradictions in Scripture,” in The Crucified Messiah and Other Essays [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1974], pp. 159–77).

3:12 / Paul both reappraises his Jewish heritage in light of Christ and critiques it. He understands that fundamental to Judaism is faith. His use of Abraham demonstrates this more clearly than anything else could. For Jews, Abraham occupies the preeminent place he does with God and for God’s people because he responded to God’s call, because he trusted God; therefore, the Jewish people were founded on the basis of faith. Paul’s reappraisal of Judaism consists in separating faith from law observance (see comments on 3:6). He writes: the law is not based on faith. Paul’s critique of Judaism is that the life it may provide is only life under law—the one who practices law can do nothing but live by law. Paul’s view is that since the coming of Christ such a way of life is seriously flawed. Now the law has been separated from faith, and it is with faith, not the law, that righteousness comes.

3:13 / Paul believes that the change in the relationship between law and faith within Judaism results from Christ’s death, which Paul interprets in various ways throughout his letters. As M. D. Hooker has noted, none of the images Paul uses to speak about the cross “is complete in itself” (Not Ashamed of the Gospel: New Testament Interpretation of the Death of Christ [Carlisle: Paternoster, 1994], p. 45). Here it serves the apostle’s purpose to interpret Christ’s death as one in which Christ became a curse. This description should be understood in the context of the following scriptural quotation. Paul uses metonymy: Christ did not become as the law is (the curse of the law); Christ took on the position of those under the law—he became accursed. Citing Deuteronomy 21:23, Paul describes Christ’s death as one who was accursed, cut off from his people and from God. This place of curse is one that Paul and others were in until Christ redeemed them. Through his death Christ delivered believers from the “curse of the law” and thereby severed the relationship between faith in him and law. There is no need to follow law, for those who believe in Christ are released from law.

The quotation from Deuteronomy 21:23 contains the word “curse,” as did the first quotation (3:10, citing Deut. 27:26). In the scriptural context of each quotation the word “curse” indicates exclusion from the community. In Deuteronomy 27:26 all the people say “amen” to the curse, thereby affirming their stand against the behavior cursed and their willingness to shun anyone disobeying the law. The context of the Deuteronomy 21:23 quote is instruction about the burial of a criminal’s corpse: when someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and so executed and hung on a tree, the corpse must not remain all night upon the tree but should be buried that day, for “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” The exposed corpse of a dead criminal would defile the land God gives as an inheritance. The language of curse in relation to Christ’s death serves Paul’s point of emphasizing that through the Galatians’ faith in the death of Christ (3:1) they already are descendants of Abraham (3:7). He affirms that Christ’s death released believers from the curse of potentially being excluded from the people of God and effected inclusion within the people of God for those in Christ.

Paul’s use of Deuteronomy 21:23, in which the cursed person is a criminal deserving death, and his statement that Christ’s death was in our stead (for us), make plain that Paul thinks that Christ died for our sins. Nevertheless, Paul does not say explicitly that Christ died for our sins; he does not state directly that Christ’s death was a “sin offering” (cf. Rom. 8:3–4). The mechanics of salvation are beyond the rational realm. It is probably best to take Paul’s words as metaphorical. He seeks to explain his conviction that Christ’s death has effected the end of the law and opened the way for all to benefit from being the people of God. Paul’s focus is not on the manner in which Christ’s death made salvation available but on the fact that salvation is in Christ, apart from the law, and that those who believe in Christ are now incorporated into Christ.

Paul’s use of the first person plural pronoun us does not indicate that the Galatians had been following the Jewish law before they came to faith in Christ. In fact, we know that they had been pagans (4:8). Rather, Paul is describing the stages of God’s salvation plan, which he will describe in more depth in the subsequent verses. Before Christ everyone, Jew and pagan, was in slavery to the law (cf. 3:23), for whether one was a Jew or a pagan, there was no other way to deal with sin than through the law one knew (cf. Rom. 2:14). The ancient world understood law in a general sense to be that which reflected justice. As Aristotle says, “ ‘The just’ therefore means that which is lawful or that which is equal and fair” (Eth. nic. 5.1.8 [Rackham, LCL]). Law was a way of measuring and achieving justice. By broadening the field to speak about law in general Paul asserts that the Galatians have already followed the law. This is an effective rhetorical strategy, for the conclusion is plain that through believing in Christ crucified (cf. 3:1), the Galatians have already once turned from following law.

3:14 / Paul speaks of the blessing given to Abraham in the first instance, which accords with the scriptural passages. Yet he immediately moves to his own interpretation of that blessing—the promise of the Spirit. It is this which Paul says we … receive … by faith. Whereas in 3:2 he had reminded his readers of what they had received, now Paul also affirms that he too has received the promise through faith. This shift is perhaps related to the fact that Paul directly relates reception of the promise to the death of Christ. As Paul tends to speak personally of the death of Christ as one in which he participates or one that is for him (2:20), it may be that Paul instinctively includes himself when speaking of Christ’s death (3:13) and its consequences (3:14).

Paul says that the promise comes through Christ Jesus. The Greek reads not “through Christ,” but “in Christ,” en Xristō. This verse resonates with the scriptural quote in 3:8: “All nations will be blessed through [in] you.” Just as God promised that in Abraham the nations would be blessed, so now it is in Christ Jesus that that blessing has come about. As R. B. Hays says about this verse: “It is only through participation in him that the Gentiles receive the blessing” (The Faith of Jesus Christ, p. 208).

The phrase by faith in the Greek is literally “through the faith” (dia tēs pisteōs), and it stands in parallelism with “in Christ Jesus.” If a subjective genitive reading for 2:16 is adopted (see Introduction), the sense here would be “we receive the Spirit through the faith (of Christ) in which we participate by being in Christ, and we are in Christ because we are believers.”

3:15 / This is the first time since 1:11 that Paul addresses his readers as brothers. (This designation undoubtedly was meant to refer to both the male and female members of the Galatian churches.) He says that he wants to get at the issue at hand from the perspective of everyday life. Paul takes his example from the legal world and uses the case of a human covenant. His example turns out to be very brief, for he returns almost immediately to a discussion of Scripture.

On the basis of his distinctive understanding of the relationship of God’s promise to Abraham and the giving of the law, Paul implicitly criticizes the rival evangelists for suggesting that in the law God has annulled God’s promise that the righteous shall live by faith. This appears to be a response to what the troublemakers may have been preaching or what Paul understands as the consequence of their advocating of the law. Paul is convinced that the result of the rival gospel is to set aside or add to God’s covenant with Abraham.

3:16 / Paul takes up the matter of the promises that he introduced in 3:14. Normally Paul speaks of promise in the singular, as he did in 3:14, but in this verse and 3:21 he uses the plural (see also Rom. 9:4).

The biblical narrative has God making a promise to Abraham that concerns his offspring, or seed (Gen. 13:15; 17:7; 24:7), but Paul interprets these Scriptures to be saying that the promises were spoken both to Abraham and to the seed. His subsequent point emphasizing that “seed” is in the singular takes its significance from his interpretation that the promises were spoken to this seed, who is Christ. Such a reading of the Scripture bolsters his contention that through being “in Christ,” the Galatians already have received the promise to Abraham (3:14). Since the promises were made both to Abraham and to Christ, those in Christ also inherit the promises to Abraham.

The word “seed,” often translated “offspring,” is found in Genesis 15:3, where Abram laments that God has given him no seed and so a slave shall be his heir. God promises that he will have a real heir and that Abram’s legitimate descendants will be as numerous as the stars in heaven (Gen. 15:4–5). Because Abram believed this “the Lord … credited it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). Paul’s reference to the promises made to Abraham and his offspring is an implicit reminder of Abraham’s faith. Reference to the story of Abraham also foreshadows the story of Hagar and Sarah, a story to which Paul will turn later.

3:17 / Paul starts to build his case for the priority of the covenant by noting that the law came much later than the covenant. Consequently, on the analogy of the example he used in verse 15, this has no effect on the original covenant.

Paul makes plain that his previous example from daily life (3:15) is to be applied to the issue of the relationship of the covenant and the law and of the Galatians’ relationship to the promise to Abraham. The covenant is God’s, and in referring to the covenant Paul is referring to the promise God gave to Abraham. Through repetition (“does not set aside”; “do away with”) Paul stresses that it is false to think that God’s law would set aside God’s covenant. The covenant, the promise to Abraham, was not made void through God’s giving of the law. In order to make his case against the rival evangelists Paul divides Abraham’s faith from his obedience to the covenant. Now Paul makes a distinction between what in the Jewish mind was of a piece—the covenant and the law. The rival evangelists were likely arguing that the covenant included the law, that is, that obedience to the law was requisite for those who thought they were beneficiaries of the covenant. We see a similar understanding in Jewish Christian texts such as James 2:8–12 and the gospel of Matthew, where fulfilling the law through faith in Christ is an uncontested part of being a believer. Paul’s stance is that the life of faith is at odds with obedience to the law, at least for Gentiles.

3:18 / That Paul is shaping the argument on his terms is suggested further by the fact that here he works on the basis of a separation between law and inheritance. The following Sabbath prayer from the period of the Second Temple makes it plain that such a separation would have been foreign to the Jewish mindset, for the covenant, the law, and the inheritance were regarded as expressions of God’s gracious love: “From thy love, O Lord our God, with which thou loved thy people Israel, and from thy compassion, our King, which thou bestowed on the sons of thy covenant, thou has given us, O Lord our God, this great and hallowed seventh day in love” (t. Berakoth 3.7; quoted from E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, p. 231). Yet Paul divorces the inheritance from the law. He argues that since the inheritance was given through the promise to Abraham and not through the law, then by implication if the Galatians are concerned about their inheritance they should focus on the promise instead of the law (cf. Rom. 4:16). By introducing the concept of inheritance Paul moves the argument forward. This concept will become increasingly important in his argument.

This is the only time in this letter that Paul uses the word charizomai (translated gave). In other letters this word occurs in the context of emphasizing God’s gracious activity in Christ (Rom. 8:32) or in giving the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:12). Here Paul stresses that the inheritance promised to Abraham is based on nothing more or less than God’s gracious gift. Implicit in this statement is that if the inheritance is shaped by gift and promise, then the Galatians are misguided to think that they can achieve it through a law-observant lifestyle.