Gal. iii. 27 — 29. As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jeiv nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female:
for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abrahams seed, and heirs according to the
promise.
TO enter fully into these words, the whole scope of the Apostle's argument should be duly considered. He has been insisting upon justification by faith alone, without the deeds of the law. This, to a Jew, was a most unpalatable doctrine, because it set aside the observance of all those ceremonies which had been ordained of God under the Mosaic dispensation. Hence many, after they had embraced the faith of
I. fit
Christ, were still zealous for the law ; and desirous of blending the law with the Gospel, as a joint-ground of their hope before God. Persons of this stamp had come among the Galatian converts, and had perverted the minds of many. Hence the Apostle, in this Epistle to the Galatians, expostulates with those who had been drawn aside, as having acted a most foolish and unreasonable part. " O foolish Galatians ! who hath bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?" He then proceeds to reason with them : ' Have you not had amongst yourselves an evident proof and demonstration that the Gospel which I preached to you is true ? The Holy Spirit set his seal to the truth of it, by his miraculous operations : but did he ever, in one instance, so confirm the doctrines opposed to ita ? Besides, with my doctrine agree the declarations of God himself; who says, that as Abraham was justified by faith, so by the same faith the whole heathen world shall be justified b. But to the law no power of justifying is ever ascribed. That can do nothing but condemn : and it is only by pleading what Christ has done and suffered to deliver us from its curse, that any one of us can ever escape its curse, and obtain the blessings which are accorded to us by the Abrahamic covenant0.'
To make this matter clear, he illustrates it by a well-known fact. ' If,' says he, ' a covenant be made between men, it cannot be disannulled, except by the consent of both the parties that are interested in it. But Abraham, and all his believing seed throughout the whole world and to the very end of time, were inter- ested in the covenant made with Abraham ; whereas, in the covenant made four hundred and thirty years afterwards on Mount Sinai, none but Abraham's natural descendants, and a very small portion even of them, were interested: and therefore this latter covenant can never supersede the former, or in any
a ver. 2 — "). b ver. G— 9. c ver. 10 — 14.