BROTHERS, LET ME take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. 16The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ. 17What I mean is this: The law, introduced 430 years later, does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise. 18For if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on a promise; but God in his grace gave it to Abraham through a promise.
Original Meaning
HAVING ESTABLISHED THAT Scripture confirms the experience of the Galatians, namely, that God grants his Spirit to people because they surrender to Christ and not because they conform their lives to the Mosaic law, Paul now moves to another kind of argument, an analogy or “example from everyday life” (cf. also Rom. 3:5; 6:19; 1 Cor. 9:8).1 Through it he makes his point once again: the law of Moses is not God’s most important revelation; that revelation is God’s promise to Abraham. This means that the response demanded of Abraham is also more significant than the response demanded through Moses. That is, faith (Abraham’s response)—not works of the law—is the foundation of our relationship to God (cf. Rom. 4:13–15). (It is no wonder that Paul must soon cover his tracks and speak about the purpose of the law in Gal. 3:19–25.)
Paul compares his teaching to the legal arrangement of covenants of inheritance. He argues that the legal system prohibits the subtraction or addition to a covenant that has been established properly. Knowing that the arrangement God worked out with Abraham was in effect a covenant, Paul can argue that nothing could have been added to or taken away from that covenant (though that is not his concern here). Thus, if God established a covenant with Abraham, the law, which was “added” 430 years later, cannot revise the terms of the original covenant. And (here is his point), if God’s covenant was established by faith and not by works of the law, then the covenantal relationship God has with the Galatians through Christ is also by faith and not by works of the law—if Abraham is the key person in the heritage.
Paul makes several points in his discussion of covenants. (1) He states his analogy from covenants governing inheritance2 (v. 15). (2) He clears some ground by clarifying the ultimate party of the covenantal arrangement with God (v. 16). (3) He next applies the analogy itself to the relationship of Abraham’s covenant to Moses’ law (v. 17). (4) By way of parenthesis, he restates his argument by analogy, this time drawing more on the language of inheritance: since inheritance laws show that one receives an inheritance as a result of a promise, it follows that the inheritance of Abraham’s blessing must be by way of promise and not by way of the works of the law (v. 18).
In proceeding through this argument, Paul once again lays before his readers his two alternatives: either they must choose Abraham, with his blessings climaxed in the gift of the Holy Spirit, or they must choose Moses, with his “works of the law” and the consequent “curse of the law.” I am convinced that what Paul is doing with the Galatians is teaching them how to read the Bible properly (and, for them, differently). They had learned to read the Bible through the eyes of Moses as interpreted by the priests and Pharisees; Paul wants them to learn to read the Bible through the eyes of Abraham. This approach focuses on God’s covenant and faith as the response to God’s offer in the covenant. In addition, this Abrahamic approach focuses on a universal plan of God (Gen. 12:2–3) rather than a nationalistic emphasis on Israel that comes through a Mosaic approach.
The analogy from covenants (v. 15) Essentially Paul’s argument is that the way a human covenant operates is certainly the same way as a divine covenant does (an a fortiori argument). Although scholars today are unsure about which particular legal institution Paul is using (Roman, Greek, Jewish),3 they are agreed that Paul’s point is secure: when a covenant or testament or last will has been established—probably after the death of the testator4—someone cannot come along and add to it or take away from it.
A clarification (v. 16) “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed.” Here we must understand “promises” as virtually equivalent to the “covenant” in the analogy; Paul confirms this view of “promises” in verse 17, where he uses “covenant.” Paul’s analogy, then, is between the covenant of inheritance in the legal world and the covenant of promise made with Abraham.
In applying this analogy to the relationship of the Abrahamic covenant to the Mosaic law, Paul realizes that he must first prove that the Abrahamic covenant applies to the Christian era. He does this by means of a special form of interpretation (then quite common), in which he sees in “seed” (which could be either singular or plural) a “corporate solidarity” in Christ. That is, Christ is the “seed” about whom God made promises, and all those who are “in Christ” are also the “seed” (v. 29).5 This provides an important clarification, for readers of the Bible might be led to think that the “seed of Abraham” refers to all Israelites and, furthermore, they might wonder how it is that Paul can claim that Gentiles are under the covenant of Abraham. By stating that Christ is the “seed,” Paul interprets Genesis 13:15 and 24:7 in a Christian manner and reveals that the Abrahamic covenant is the one that climaxes in Christ and those who believe in him.
The application of the analogy (v. 17) Now that Paul has shown that the covenant of Abraham applies to Christians, he applies the analogy of the law of covenants of inheritance. And his point is quite simple: The law of Moses was given 430 years (Exod. 12:40–42) after the covenant was made with Abraham; therefore, since the covenant (made with Abraham, not Moses) is irrevocable, the law cannot change the arrangements God made with Abraham. This means that the promise stands firm and the mode of relating to God is faith rather than works of the law.
What is the “covenant of Abraham”? It has been customary, in theology, to prefer the term testament for a unilateral (one-sided) arrangement, initiated and carried out by one person, and to use the term covenant for a bilateral arrangement. There were two Greek terms for covenant: diatheke and syntheke, the latter clearly implying equality of partners. It is also clear that Greek translators of the Hebrew term berith did not want to make the covenant of Abraham to sound like a mutual arrangement of equal parties, so they chose the term diatheke. In the history of discussion, some theologians have stressed the unilateral nature of God’s covenant with Abraham and have sometimes even preferred the expression the “testament of Abraham.” And, of course, this has become the standard way Christians describe the Bible: Old Testament and New Testament.
On the other hand, since there is clearly an obligation on the part of the persons (Abraham and his corporate “seed”) to commit themselves to the obligations of the covenant (i.e., circumcision, obedience to the law, surrender), other theologians prefer the translation “covenant.” I shall use the term covenant because I agree that, while God’s arrangement with Abraham was sovereignly initiated and established, Abraham did have an obligation to live within the parameters established by God.6 Their relationship, however, was by no means equal, and the covenant should never be understood as a mutually agreed upon agreement.
The original promise given to Abraham7 (cf. Gen. 12:2–3; 17:1–8) had within it eight separate promises: (1) offspring, (2) blessing for Abraham, (3) a great name, (4) blessing or cursing, depending on how one treated Abraham, (5) occupancy of the Promised Land, (6) blessing of Gentiles, (7) God being God to his people, and (8) kings descending from Abraham. This promise, I believe, was administered, in the history of God’s dealing with humans, in three separate covenantal arrangements: (1) the covenant of circumcision from Abraham to Moses, (2) the covenant of Moses from Moses to Christ, and (3) the new covenant from Christ to the end of time. From this brief sketch on “how to read the Bible,” we can see the crucial role Abraham played in being the one with whom God set up his promise and began his covenantal arrangements.
Promise to Abraham | Circumcision | Mosaic | New |
Abraham–Moses | Moses–Christ | Promissory Administrative Christ–Kingdom |
I believe also that this centrality of Abraham is exactly what Paul sees as askew in the Judaizers; they had elevated Moses over Abraham and so, in effect, missed out on the crucial promissory nature of God’s covenants with his people. Paul, as anyone can see who reads Galatians 3, wants to anchor the essence of God’s mode of relating to people in Abraham and not in Moses. That is why he says that “the law … does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise” (v. 17).
The restatement of the argument by analogy (v. 18) The promise of an inheritance rests on the promise; put differently, it rests on the covenantal arrangement established by the person. God gave a promise of great things to Abraham. He did this, says Paul, “through a promise.” If, with the Judaizers, the Galatians think they will inherit the blessing of Abraham by works of the law, then God was wrong in how he set it all up. God did not demand of Abraham to obey the law. In fact, as Paul has shown, the law was not even around; it came 430 years later. This must mean that the way to inherit the blessing of Abraham (which the Judaizers and Galatians both want dearly to inherit) is the way Abraham got it: by faith in God’s promises.
Paul seems to be going further: those who commit themselves to the law as the system of salvation nullify the promises of the Abrahamic covenant; those who commit themselves to the Abrahamic covenant as the system of salvation cannot ask the law of Moses also to save them. Why then, after all, did God give the law if everything was provided in the Abrahamic covenant? Good question, one that Paul answers next (vv. 19–25).
Bridging Contexts
OVER AND OVER we have seen that Paul’s concern is the same: one is accepted by God through faith in Christ and not by doing the works of the law. Once again, this is Paul’s point here: the covenant of Abraham, one participated in by faith, was God’s original design for people. The law of Moses, participated in by works of the law, was a secondary revelation and is not the primary way God wants us to relate to him. All of this is “old stuff” by now, and we tend to tire of applying the same message from every passage.
What is new in this passage (and the next one) is something highly important for each person: namely, Paul sets out here for us how to read the Bible and put it together, even though he does not explicitly tell us this. At times when we are interpreting a passage in the Bible, we need to see what is behind what the author is saying and distill it to find the presuppositions of the author. Usually such presuppositions are not expressed, so we have to work hard at times to find them.
I have stated some of the presuppositions Paul is using in our passage in the commentary above. What we need to observe here is that, before we can apply this passage to our world, we need to have these presuppositions before us, for these presuppositions are what propel him forward in his argument and what give his arguments their foundation. So we must ask, How did Paul read his Bible as revealed in our passage?
First, Paul presupposed that the promise, or covenant, given to Abraham was the foundation of God’s revelation to his people. Why does he bring up the analogy of the legal situation pertaining to a covenant (testament) and its irrevocability? Because he knows that it fits what he knows about how God wants to work with people. In other words, he knows that the law of Moses came after the covenant with Abraham; therefore he can make the law of Moses secondary to the covenant with Abraham—so much so that he has to spend six more verses of complex argument to reveal why God gave the law. Now all of this is based upon the priority of the Abrahamic covenant.
Second, Paul argues that the Abrahamic covenant is one of faith and not works of the law, even though Abraham was commanded by God to be circumcised (Gen. 17:9–27). But it is also clear that Paul does not bring in circumcision here because he knows (1) that the Judaizers will jump all over his case and (2) that Abraham was pronounced righteous before he was circumcised (thus he assumed that circumcision was not part of the original promise; cf. v. 6; also Rom. 4:9–12).
Third, Paul also assumes that, while the law has importance for shedding light on the Christian’s ethical behavior, it is not as important for Christians as the Judaizers were claiming. Paul addresses this point in verses 19–25, and we postpone discussion of this point until then.
How then are we to read the Bible in an apostolic, Christian manner? We must begin with Abraham and let the Abrahamic covenant set the agenda for everything that follows. This means we must live before God in faith and do the “works of the law” as something that demonstrates our faith in God’s promise, not as something that provides acceptance with God. Furthermore, Christians, who live in the era when the new covenant administers the Abrahamic promises, do not have to live by the law, since they have something better than the law to guide them: they have the Spirit. Does this rule out the law and teach us to throw away the books of Moses? Definitely not! What Paul teaches, and I will show this in our discussion of Galatians 5, is that those who live in the Spirit do exactly what God wants and so fulfill the law. They do everything the law ever wanted us to do and more.
In summary, Paul sets out a scheme for reading the Bible, a scheme drawn along historical lines. He evaluates the concept of legal covenants of inheritance and applies such to how God’s covenant with Abraham relates to the law of Moses. This application, then, is a revelation on how to read the Bible. A chart of these relationships is set out here. I am assuming here some of the points that are not made by Paul until verses 19–25 and giving emphasis to the characteristics Paul mentions regarding the period from Abraham to Christ.
God → gives promise to Abraham by faith → which is fulfilled in Christ.
People who respond properly
respond in faith.
Moses’ law obtains after Abraham
and only until Christ.
Jews are under sin and a curse
during this time.
The promise of Abraham gives life, and, when Christ comes, it also gives the Spirit. The law of Moses brings a curse and does not bring life.
The scheme of Paul, then, is historical (from Abraham to Christ, with an intervention by Moses), and we do not operate with a Christian reading of Scripture if we do not see God’s promises in Abraham as critical and fulfilled in Christ. Christ’s work is not something totally new; it is the climactic fulfillment of the promises given to Abraham. When Abraham sacrificed the heifer, the she-goat, the ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon, and when God passed between this sacrifice (Gen. 15:9–21), what Abraham did not know (but we do) is that God was setting out for his Abrahamic people his first revelation of sacrifice that would pass through the Levitical rituals, the tabernacle, and the temple, and would come to its perfect completion in the sacrifice of Christ (v. 14; Heb. 8–10). We who trust in Christ’s perfect sacrifice were, in effect, standing with Abraham when he accepted God’s establishment of the covenant in Genesis 15.
Contemporary Significance
HOW SHOULD WE read the Bible? Let me suggest a few ways in which the normal Christian reads the Bible, and let me also suggest that few people read the Bible with the depth of Paul because they have not been taught the important category of “covenantal interpretation.”
First, most of us read the Bible in a highly individual manner. We read the Bible for personal blessing, personal guidance, and personal instruction, and we should. But sometimes our individual desires express a rank egocentric approach to life and Bible reading. This shows up when we seek constantly to gain an emotional experience, to gain approval with God for reading his Word as a discipline, to gain honor from others for our brilliance, to find a promise for the day, or to gain insights (tricky ones at that) for sermons and talks. While I know that God uses our highly individual desires to teach us something, I also know that frequently our individual approaches lead us to find meanings that are not there and teachings that are simply not accurate. One of the goals of this series is to help us to learn to interpret the Bible more accurately, both in its original meaning and its contemporary significance.
Second, we often read the Bible apart from contexts. Perhaps this is a result of the convention of a Bible separated into verses rather than paragraphs. Many Christians today like to read the Bible as if it were all like Proverbs—that is, as if it contained nothing but random sayings that have almost no connection to one another. But thankfully, more and more publishers are printing Bibles in a paragraph format rather than a verse format. I believe this will encourage reading the Bible more contextually.
An example from Galatians 3:13 may suffice. If I am correct (and many agree with me here) that “us” here refers to Jewish Christians, then at one level it is incorrect to say that Christ freed “us Gentiles” from the curse of the law. My point is not mitigated even if I admit that it can apply to “us Gentiles” indirectly through the law written in our hearts. My point is this: reading the Bible simply by verses can lead anyone with a desire for application to think that “us” means “both Jews and Gentiles.” Reading the Bible in this way leads us into misreading.
Third, we often read the Bible without a big picture. This, of course, is part of the problem of reading the Bible apart from contexts because the “big picture” is part of the context of a proper reading. There are three major “contexts”: (1) the book in which the passage occurs; (2) the essential program of how to put the Bible together; and (3) the fundamental ideas of the Bible put together systematically. Since I am concerned here with the second, I will speak briefly to the first and third before getting to the second.
One major context for reading a passage is to understand it in light of the book’s basic ideas. Just as it is important for readers today to know if a given statement about the truthfulness of universalism comes from a neoorthodox thinker (who thinks that all will eventually be saved) or from an orthodox thinker (who thinks that the term means that “all kinds” but not “everyone” will be blessed by God), so it is important for us today to know if we are quoting James or Paul or Matthew when we use the term righteousness (sometimes translated “justification”).8 Not reading contextually too easily results in misreadings.
For Galatians we simply need to read each passage in light of the whole book and then recognize that fuller ideas may be given to us as we read more of Paul’s other letters and other books in the New Testament. For now we concentrate on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. At the beginning we read: “Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by man …” (1:1). If this verse began Ephesians or 1 Thessalonians or almost any other of the Pauline letters, we would not get the import from it that we get from Galatians. But that is because we know that Paul is fighting Judaizers in Galatia who deny Paul’s divine calling and who assert that Paul is nothing more than a Jerusalem missionary who has abbreviated the message of Jerusalem in order to gain more converts. So when Paul says “not from men” in verse 1, we gain a sharper focus as to what he is saying because we know the context of the book, the context of what such expressions mean in their larger context of meaning.
Another part of the “big picture” is our overall view of theology. We believe that the message of the Bible is unified and that, somehow, it can all be put together in a synthetic way. Anyone who believes this will want to synthesize seemingly discordant passages. I take but one example from Galatians (again from 3:6–9) and compare it to James 2:14–26. Paul teaches that justification is by faith alone, while James teaches that justification is by works and not by faith alone. At a formal level, this is a contradiction; but at a deeper theological level it is harmonious. Put together, which is part of the big picture, what we find is that while justification is by faith, saving faith is a faith that works. Paul needs to focus on one because he is doing battle with Judaizers who think a person must obey Moses to be justified; James needs to focus on the other because he is doing battle with some who said that simple creedal faith justifies. While each emphasizes one extreme, at a deeper level they can be put together by defining saving faith in a broader way. We must learn to read the Bible in such a way that our conclusions from one book do not contradict our conclusions from another book.
The third area of the “big picture” (the middle one in the list above) is our overall program of putting the Bible together. My reading of literature allows me to (over)simplify the possible approaches into two. The first teaches that God has always operated in one way with his people, and that way is outlined in the covenantal arrangement with Abraham. The second teaches that God has operated in different ways in different periods of history. The first is usually called “covenant theology”; the second, “dispensationalism.”9 I am aware that this is an oversimplification of the issue. After all, some covenant theologians point out some of the “discontinuities” between the Old and New Covenants while emphasizing the “continuities.” (Continuities and discontinuities usually apply to such ideas as the relationship of Israel to the church: Is Old Testament Israel now the church, or are they two completely different groups?) Correspondingly, some dispensationalists, while they clearly show the “discontinuities,” also point out the “continuities.” I must add that both systems emphasize the covenant, with the covenant theologians emphasizing the one covenant and the dispensationalists emphasizing the variety of ways (covenants) God has worked in history.
Furthermore, dispensationalism today is not what it was two and three decades ago; great changes are taking place.10 I fit myself more into the covenant group, though I, with Daniel Fuller, do not want to stress the opposition of law and grace. I will expound more of a covenant approach in the paragraphs that follow because I believe that verse 15–18 are rooted in Paul’s own form of covenant theology. What I want to emphasize in my discussion is the absolute importance of the Abrahamic covenant in reading the Bible from cover to cover.
Readers of the Bible need to understand the importance of God’s promise to Abraham (Gen. 12:2–3; see also 13:14–17; 15:1–6; 17:1–8): that God would make him into a great nation (the theme of Israel), that God established his relationship with his people through a sacrifice (15:7–21), that God would bless Abraham and make his name great, that God would treat people the way people treated Abraham, and that God would bless the whole world through Abraham (the theme of universalism). We see also that what was expected of Abraham was faith (15:6) and obedience (17:9–21). What we find is that God’s original promise to Abraham is the foundation of all his relationships with people from that time on and into eternity. In Abraham’s promises we find the plan of God, his grand scheme of things for the world. God has entered into a relationship with his people, sworn by an irrevocable oath, and this is the only way people enter into fellowship with God. We also discover that Moses’ law does not replace the Abrahamic promise, but it clarifies what God wants of his people who do believe in him. I believe that in reading the Bible through Abrahamic covenant categories, we suddenly grasp the totality of the Bible—what God is doing and what he wants to do with his people.
What readers of the Bible can do here, if they wish to gain a grand perspective of what God is doing, is to trace his promises given to Abraham through the entire Bible in their daily Bible readings.11 I suggest then that each person have a separate sheet of paper for each of the eight themes listed above and, while reading, make observations from separate chapters in the Bible on how these promises are working themselves out in the Bible. Is the option of reading the entire Bible through the eyes of the category of the covenant of Abraham only one among many? While surely people can read the Bible using other categories, this category is the one Paul used, and it therefore becomes an apostolic reading of the Bible. Remember, the heart of Paul’s mystery was in effect a new reading of the Bible; his mystery related to the relationship of Gentiles and Israel to the promises of God given to Abraham. I can think of no better way to approach the Bible than through the covenant of Abraham.
The next step is to relate the fullness of the new covenant to the Abrahamic promise and covenant. What response is expected to God’s promise to Abraham, and what is the response expected for the new covenant? What is the means of establishing the promises to Abraham and the new covenant? Who is the covenant of Abraham designed for, and for whom does God establish the new covenant? (Thus, what is the relationship of Israel to the church?) Other particular questions come to mind: What is the relationship of God’s promise to Abraham that he would bless or curse people depending on how they relate to Abraham, on the one hand, and, on the other, how Jesus says something similar about how people respond to him (Matt. 10:32–33) and to his disciples (10:40–42)? Is there a relationship between the land promised to Israel (Gen. 13:14–17) and the world (Rom. 4:13; 8:20–21; Rev. 19:11–16)? One final question: What is the relationship of the law of Moses (which came 430 years after Abraham but is surely God’s revealed will for his people) to the teachings of Jesus and Paul about God’s indwelling Spirit? We shall touch on this question in our interpretation of the next passage.