Galatians 3:15

To give a human example, brothers, even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified.

Paul now proceeds to the third point in his argument that the Law has failed to bring anyone righteousness. The Law did not bring the presence of the Spirit; that was point one. But the Law did bring a curse on all who trusted it; that was point two. In fact, the Law prevented God from keeping His promises to Abraham; that was point three. Finally, the Law set up the cross as the only way out of its failure; that was point four. Paul has set up a strong contrast – even seemingly a direct conflict – between what God did through Abraham and what God did through Moses. The difference between the two was as great as the difference between a blessing and a curse, between a promise and an obstacle preventing the promise from being kept.

Paul certainly appears to be saying that the Law was working against God’s will. Paul appears to be saying that the Law had so completely hindered God’s keeping His promise that He had been forced to take the radical action of sending the Messiah to get around the bottle-neck created by the Law. That may be what Paul appears to be saying, but clearly it isn’t really what he is saying. If God is anything, He is consistent, constant, dependable, true. He does not work at cross purposes to Himself. So it was, and is, impossible to believe that the Law was contrary to God’s will, and this in spite of having concluded that the Law does not come from God’s faithfulness to us. So what is there in the will of God that is other than His faithfulness to us? This is the question Paul must answer in the last half of this chapter.

All the force of the revelation indicated that it was God Himself who had given the Law and meant it when He did. True, He seems to use a different and new name when He appeared to Moses than when He appeared to Abraham – the name Yahweh – but even as He introduced the new name He had called Himself the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. It was not plausible that it was a different God who appeared to Moses than the One who had appeared to Abraham. God made it very plain that there was only One of Him to appear. Paul’s Gentile converts might fall into that trap; modern Christians sometimes fall into this trap when they imagine the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New Testament” are distinct from each other; but none of Paul’s Jewish opponents would have made that mistake.

Taking all of this into account, Paul appears to be saying that God was vacillating, changing course in midstream, in one generation doing one thing and in another generation undoing what He had previously done and doing something else. Was God then befuddled or indecisive or just plain incompetent? Or worse, was He senile like His namesake, the Canaanite version of El? If Paul taught that God was capable of introducing a Law so that anyone who really trusted it, really relied on it, would be betrayed and cursed by it, then how could any faithful Jew take Paul seriously at all? How can Paul mean anything other than that God made a big mistake?

To answer these questions required that he discuss covenants. Whenever the Bible discusses the relationship between God and His people, it describes it as a covenant. God made a covenant with the entire creation after the Flood. God made a covenant with Abraham when He counted his faith as righteousness and promised him a son. God made a covenant with the whole nation of Israel when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the Law. God made a covenant with David when He promised an eternal kingdom to him. And Jesus made a covenant with us at the Last Supper just before the crucifixion. The idea of the covenant is central to the meaning of the Bible. If you want to understand the Bible with any depth you will need to pay careful attention to the covenants, you will need to understand the overall covenant structure of the Bible and how the individual covenants fit into that structure. The conflict Paul had suggested between God’s gift of righteousness to Abraham and God’s gift of the Law to Moses boils down to a difference between the purposes of the two covenants.

So he begins with a human example of a covenant. The biblical covenants were modeled on the Middle Eastern custom of covenant making. There were many kinds of covenants that were common in the ancient Middle East. One was like a treaty between nations, either a peace treaty between allies, or an armistice between a conqueror and his new vassal. Abraham had made a covenant – a mutual defense treaty – with Mamre the Amorite (Genesis 14:13); and then he and Isaac both made covenants – peace treaties – with Abimelech (Genesis 21 and 26). The bizarre ceremony in Genesis 15 was modeled after the ceremony used to ratify covenants between a conquering king and a defeated king.

Another kind of covenant was like a business contract. Solomon made a covenant, a trade agreement, with Hiram the king of Tyre (I Kings 5:12). And since marriages were commonly arranged between the parents of the couple, they were formalized as a covenant (see Malachi 2:14ff). God took the cultural idea of the covenant as practiced in the Middle East and used it for His own purposes. He had called Abraham originally in order to reveal Himself over the future generations of Abraham’s descendants, and when he used the covenant as the organizational principle of His revelation, He was speaking their language.

In other letters, Paul uses marriage as his model for our covenant relationship with God, but here in Galatians the human example he chooses is a business contract. This is an example of a covenant that even we modern people can understand easily. Once a contract has been drawn up and the two parties have “signed on the dotted line”, then it is never legal for one of the parties to go back and change the terms of the contract. One might try negotiating a new contract to replace the first one, but failing that, one can’t ignore a term of the contract or add a new one on to it; and one can’t just walk away. A contract is an obligation with the force of the whole legal and economic system behind it.

I think Paul chose to use a business contract as his example because he was writing to a largely Gentile audience. All forms of covenants were respected in Israel, but among the Gentiles, treaties and marriages and such like were considerably more fluid than in Israel. It is the same for us. In most of our culture, marriages can hardly be said to be covenants at all. It takes some legal effort to get out of a marriage, even today, but not very much. And we have proven, as a nation, notoriously prone to setting aside treaties with other nations. Business contracts are the most abiding and inviolable form of the covenant in the modern world. This says a lot about us. Money is what we really honor.

Implicit in this verse is an assertion: if human covenants are so important as to be inviolable, how much more inviolable are God’s covenants? When God made His covenant with Abraham and then made another covenant through Moses, and the two covenants were apparently, according to Paul, in some conflict with each other, and yet both inviolable, what was to be done? By bringing up the covenantal dimension of God’s promises, Paul actually seems to be making his dilemma worse. This is a good strategy, in fact, if you are sure of your position. Stack the deck against yourself. State your opponents’ strongest arguments for them, box yourself into the corner they are preparing for you, and then refute them. Your argument will be all the more convincing if you make your opponents points for him and then demolish them before your opponent has a chance to speak. That is Paul’s strategy here.

Galatians 3:16

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” which is Christ.

We now begin the second part of Paul’s extended theological argument. His first point has been that the working of faith has delivered on what the Law could never deliver, namely the intimate presence of the Spirit. From this verse through 3:22 he will be argument about a more technical detail: when there are two covenants that have conflicting clauses, which one has the precedent? Paul had just expanded the context of his argument to include the covenants made with Abraham and through Moses. First he had exposed the conflict between relying on the working of the Law and relying on the working of faith. Then he had linked faith in the Messiah to Abraham’s faith that God would keep His promises, noting that in both cases God counted the faith as righteousness. Then he had pointed out that relying on the Law brought a curse, both to Israel and to the Gentiles, in violation of one of the promises He had made to Abraham. Finally he pointed out that in the cross Jesus had become the embodiment of the curse of the Law and so redeemed us from it. But Paul needed a yet wider circle of ideas, so he backed up a bit to put everything in the context of the biblical covenants, first noting that even human covenants were held to be inviolable, legally binding. This was by way of suggesting that divine covenants were all the more inviolable because of their origin with God. To continue the argument he had to look next at each of these two inviolable and yet incompatible covenants more closely.

First, then, the covenant with Abraham. The story of the making of this covenant is found in two passages, Genesis 15 and 17, and Paul refers to them both. In the covenant with Abraham, one striking thing – one which Paul does not pick up on at this point – is that it is entirely one sided. God makes promises to Abraham, but does not make any demands of Abraham. In the covenant ritual in Genesis 15, symbolically God portrays Himself as responsible for fulfilling any obligations He may make of Abraham. But Paul focuses on the odd way God spoke to Abraham when He made the covenant: although the promises all refer to the multitude of Abraham’s future descendants and heirs, they all use a singular word for those descendants.

In Genesis 15:5 God shows Abraham the stars in the sky and asks him if he can count them; then He says “so shall your (singular) offspring be”. In Genesis 15:13 He tells Abraham that his (singular) offspring will be a sojourner in a foreign land (in English we have the plural sojourners but in Hebrew it is singular). In Genesis 15:18 He says He will give the land to his (singular) offspring. In Genesis 17:7 when He promises Abraham that he will be the father of a multitude of nations, He promises to be God to his (singular) offspring. In Genesis 17:8 He promises the land of Canaan to Abraham and to his (singular) offspring. Finally in Genesis 17:9,10 He commands Abraham and his (singular) offspring to be circumcised. Thus there are five promises made to Abraham in the context of making the covenant and all of them were made to Abraham and to his offspring, not to offsprings referring to many, but referring to one, to his offspring. And even when a whole multitude of nations was in view, the offspring was still only one.

Paul focused his attention on the singularity of the word “offspring” as being important, as being remarkable, but if it was remarkable no one but Paul seems to have previously thought so. This was not a major exegetical problem in his day. There were two ways this odd grammatical anomaly could be easily accounted for. It could be that the singular word “offspring” was being used as a collective noun to include all the descendants into a single unit. In a similar way we use Israel, a singular noun, to mean all the multitudes of Abraham’s descendants. It would not be weird if He did use it this way; when we do the same thing in English everyone understands what we mean perfectly well.

But if that is not a satisfying explanation, there is another one ready to hand. God could have used the singular to emphasize, in advance, that only one of Abraham’s immediate sons would receive the covenant and the promises. Ishmael would be an offspring before Isaac, and then many others after Isaac, but only Isaac out of all of Abraham’s “offsprings” would receive the promises. God was making a covenant not with Abraham but with Abraham+Sarah. Specifically He did not make a covenant with Abraham+Hagar or with Abraham+Keturah. Thus we have a ready made explanation of the use of the word and one that would resonate with Jews through the centuries. How well these explanations work will be considered in the next section.

Two perfectly good explanations were readily available for why the Scripture would use a singular noun at this point, but Paul rejects the traditional understanding and re-casts the entire episode – just as he re-casts the entire Old Testament – in Messianic terms. It was never really about Isaac, he says. It was always about Christ. The covenant was made with Abraham and with Christ. The promises were made to Abraham and to Christ. Isaac was a partial realization, but the full meaning of the promises did not appear until Christ.

As evidence for his understanding, he could point to the facts he had already pointed out: the Gentiles who believed in the Messiah received the Holy Spirit in parallel to Abraham, who believed God would give him heirs and received the promise of the Holy Spirit. Thus Christ is the true heir of the promises made to Abraham, just as other passages in the New Testament insist that the true Temple is Christ’s body. Christ is everything promised or predicted or hoped for. When Christ appeared to Paul at Damascus, He changed the way Paul saw all of the Scripture: they were all about Christ.

There is a sharp distinction between the way a person who accepts Jesus as the Messiah will understand the Scripture and the way a person who does not accept Jesus as the Messiah will understand it. In modern terms, there was a paradigm shift that happened when Jesus rose from the dead. One of the things that had happened to Paul on the road to Damascus was that his entire mode of interpretation of the Bible radically changed. Once he encountered Jesus alive from the dead, he began to understand that he had been misreading everything he had read in the Bible and that in some ultimate sense everything in the Bible had always been about Jesus.

Such a paradigm shift always creates three responses. There are those who embrace the change enthusiastically and systematically set about rethinking their whole understanding of everything in their lives. Then there are those who cannot submit to such a radical change and go to their graves opposing it tooth and nail. And finally there are those who recognize the validity of the change in viewpoint, but still cannot let go of everything from their previous lives and understanding; they are caught in the middle between two incompatible ideas, wanting to fully believe the one but unable to quit believing the other. The circumcision party was in that third category.

Indeed, remnants of the old paradigm still haunt the Church to this day. Paul goes on in this letter to discuss some of them, but there is another that Paul does not discuss that I will mention here. The Promised Land was one of those promises that is specifically referred to Christ. I think we make a serious error – we people who do believe that Jesus is the Messiah – we make a serious error when we think the present state of Israel is the fulfilling of the promise to Abraham of the land of his sojourning. The present state of Israel is a secular state, independent of the Messiah, and not at all the fulfilling of the promise God made to Abraham. The land of Canaan was promised to Abraham and his singular offspring, namely Christ. No doubt it will come, at the right time, to the other descendant of Abraham, but the way Paul sees it, the promise can only come through Jesus.

This is an emotional issue now, as is always the case when patriotism, rather than devotion to God, becomes central. When the creation of the state of Israel was first being discussed, there was significant resistance to it from within the Jewish community for just such a reason as I am advancing here. There was a sense at that time among a minority in Judaism that the Promised Land had to be established by the Messiah Himself or not at all. Paul, I think, would have agreed.

Galatians 3:17

This is what I mean: the Law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.

Now Paul connects the dots. He makes the point he has been driving at explicit. There were two covenants, seemingly at odds with each other and yet both of them ratified by God and binding. The covenant made with Abraham counted faith as being righteousness; the covenant made through Moses – the Law – required complete and total obedience to confer righteousness. What was to be done? The full answer requires more explanation but the critical point to begin the answer is this: the Law, the covenant given through Moses, came later and therefore is subordinate to the covenant given to Abraham.

It is the same as when modern conflicts arise in modern contracts. The one that is dated first takes precedence over any new contracts. A new contract is not legal unless the first contract is somehow terminated; then and only then can a new one be negotiated and signed. Is there anything in the Law of Moses that repudiates the covenant made with Abraham or specifically sets aside any of its provisions? No. Switching to the analogy of marriage, a second marriage is not legal unless the first marriage is terminated by divorce or death; then and only then can a new marriage be valid. Did God give any indication that He was “divorcing” Abraham and Isaac and Jacob to take a new wife?

In fact there is one, and only one point, at which God suggested something like this: in Exodus 32, retold in Deuteronomy 9, at the episode of the Golden Calf. God was so angry that He suggested to Moses that He should just wipe out all of Israel and start over with Moses in place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This plan was specifically rejected, at the urging of Moses, because of the shame and dishonor it would bring on God to fail to keep His first covenant. At that point the Law had been ratified as a covenant, and it was under the terms of the Law, spelling out death for worship of an idol, that the crisis occurred. There was no provision in the Law that Moses could appeal to to save Israel. Moses had to appeal to the higher precedent set by the covenant with Abraham.

Regardless of whether you agree with my take on the episode with the Golden Calf, Paul says explicitly in this verse that the promises made to Abraham take precedent over anything the Law says. Every commandment, every precept, every statute of the Law must be read with the understanding that they are only binding in so far as they do not conflict with the prior commitments God made to Abraham. The Law has no power whatsoever to cancel or even compromise any promise that God made to Abraham. On the contrary, the promises to Abraham super-cede and compromise the terms of the Law.

This principle tells us that to truly understand God’s purposes and intent in the Law, we must interpret it from the viewpoint of Abraham. In particular we must interpret the nature of sin and the nature of God’s wrath from a viewpoint of the covenant with Abraham and his offspring. It is Christ, the offspring of Abraham, who tells us what the Law means, and what it doesn’t mean, not the other way around. In fact, even the Law warns that it must be interpreted through Abraham.

As an example of how the Law agreed with Paul’s principle in this verse, consider Leviticus 26:14-45. There are few more vivid descriptions of God’s wrath than that one from Leviticus. It was part of the covenant of the Law that the people were obligated to obey the Law, to live by the Law, and if they spurned those statutes then they were liable to God’s wrath. What we usually miss is that God’s wrath was never capable of undoing the promise God made to Abraham. At the extremity of Israel’s rebellion, after His wrath is poured out on them, Leviticus ends by saying: “Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not spurn them, neither will I abhor them so as to destroy them utterly and break my covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God. But I will for their sake remember the covenant with their forefathers, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am the Lord.”

He did not bring them out of slavery by the Law; He brought them out of slavery before the Law was given because of His covenant promises to Abraham. He redeemed them from slavery before He gave the Law by keeping the covenant that took priority over the Law. The Law brought wrath, as Paul just said, it brought a curse and sent them into exile, but the covenant promises to Abraham and his offspring over-ruled the curse of the Law and brought them back. In other words, the wrath that results from the failure to keep the Law never lasts forever. It is limited by God’s promise. It can go only so far. It can result in devastation and destruction, famine and sword, but it cannot nullify the promise to be the God of Abraham’s offspring in all generations. Wrath, unlike grace, is strictly limited.

We have made the mistake, we still make the mistake, of thinking it is only by obedience to the Law, living by the Law, that the promise to Abraham can be ours. We have made the mistake, we still make the mistake, of thinking disobedience to the Law can annul the promise to Abraham in our own lives. When someone tells you that you can lose the righteousness you have by faith, your salvation, because of your repeated failure to do what is right or your repeated fall into sinful habits, then he disagrees with Paul. Your obedience or disobedience to the Law cannot annul the covenant previously ratified by God so as to make the promise void, the promise to count your faith as righteousness. It never annulled the promise to Abraham’s descendants in Israel and it cannot annul the promise to you.

Now it must be clearly understood what I am not saying, what Paul was not saying, that the wrath of God doesn’t exist anymore. What Paul says, and what I mean to say, is that just as wrath was not God’s first word to us, wrath is never His last word to us. Wrath is never the end, never the final state. God will not fail in His promise to be the God even of the person who chooses to worship another god. God does not fail in His promise to be the God even of the person who is brought down to Sheol by his sin. The curses of the Law do not last forever because God will not fail to keep His promises. Paul said, “all who live by the Law are under a curse” not at all meaning they are doomed to hell. God’s promise is more powerful than God’s curse.

Galatians 3:18

For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise.

Paul had just pointed out that the covenant made with Abraham had legal precedence over the covenant made through Moses, its terms had precedence over the terms in the Law. The circumcision party would find it almost impossible to argue against this point, but they did have a possible line of attack: the Law was a covenant, instituted by God Himself and ratified by blood. Therefore it also was inviolable – unless we are willing to say God made a mistake and meant to default on it. What should be done, then, with the Law? Surely it could not be simply dispensed with! Since God was perfect in wisdom and power and could not have made such a foolish mistake as to establish two incompatible covenants, it must be that the Law was somehow compatible with the promise to Abraham. It must be that both Moses and Abraham, both Law and grace, were necessary to salvation.

The circumcision party were, after all, fellow Christians. They had no problem accepting that the promises made to Abraham, and the grace of God manifested in His promises to Abraham, were foundational to Christian faith. They didn’t object to grace; they only objected to abolishing the Law. If grace and Law worked together, they would be perfectly willing to make peace with Paul. But Paul had been one of them and could anticipate their next line of attack. He understood from the inside how they thought and how they would argue, so he met their would-be attempted deflection head on. He would not take the way of compromise that opened before him.

He kept himself painted into the corner, in other words: the two could not be combined, or hybridized, or made in any way compatible. The incompatibility between the covenant with Abraham and the covenant through Moses lay in the nature of how they were administered. One was administered by a promise; the other was administered by Law. What was at stake was how Israel obtained their inheritance, the promises made to their forefather Abraham; and the primary component of that inheritance was the righteousness of Abraham which had been given simply because he believed God. God promised to be Abraham’s God and his offspring’s God, through their generations, through the long generations that stretched from Abraham up to Moses and through Moses to Abraham’s Offspring. Abraham, and all those generations after him, were righteous in God’s sight, not because of anything they did or did not do, but because God simply accepted them as righteous, regardless of what the Law said. Therefore, regardless of what the Law said, regardless of any amount of obedience or disobedience, that was the way righteousness came to God’s people. But the Law did not count that kind of righteousness.

In other words, Paul is saying that a “conditional” promise is not the same kind of promise as was given to Abraham. But why not? How does setting a condition make a promise any less of a promise? Because the terms have been changed. For example, I might say to my son, “I promise you a car at graduation if you earn straight A’s”; that is certainly a promise even though it comes with a condition. But in comparing Abraham and Moses, the distinction is between an unconditional promise – that is, a gift – and a conditional promise. It is as if the father said in September, “I promise you a car at graduation,” and then in April said, “You’ll get that car I promised if you earn straight A’s.” The car at graduation has ceased to be a gift and has become a reward to be earned. The son would justly feel misled. He had hoped for the gift and now was told he might not get it if he didn’t meet certain standards. Even so here. It would be as if God had gone back on His word.

If this inheritance of righteousness comes by the Law to any slight degree, then it no longer comes by promise; meaning that righteousness has been changed from a gift into a payment for services rendered. The two contexts are entirely incompatible, and in the worst way. On the one hand, an inheritance coming by promise depends only on God’s faithfulness to keep His word, but an inheritance coming by the Law depends on something besides God’s faithfulness. It depends on my faithfulness as well as God’s faithfulness and any lack of faithfulness on my part could cancel out God’s faithfulness. If the inheritance – which is righteousness – comes by the Law, then our disobedience can nullify the promise of God and the promise is no longer truly promised at all. This is what the mindset of legalism amounts to, both as it existed in the circumcision party and as it exists today in their spiritual descendants. The faith of legalism says that man has the power to set at naught all that God has done, all that God has promised, all that God has planned. The faith of legalism says that man has the power to make it impossible for God to keep His word.

The circumcision party was quite willing to compromise God’s sovereignty in order to keep the Law as a force in their lives. Now God’s sovereignty is the other side of the coin to His faithfulness. He is faithful to do what He promises because of His character, but also because nothing can stop Him. Another word that means “no other power can stop Him from doing as He wills” is “sovereignty”. All forms of legalism, whether ancient or modern, whether they mention the Law or use some substitute for it, make that same compromise of God’s sovereignty. They compromise God’s faithfulness and that compromise Paul would not allow.

Galatians 3:19

Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary.

Paul is closing in on his next point, which is a somewhat difficult one, so this is a good place to re-recapitulate his argument so far:

1. every Christian should know that no one can grow in righteousness by the working of the Law; growth in righteousness happens only through hearing the gospel with faith.

2. especially Jewish Christians know this because they have turned to the Messiah to receive what the Law never gave.

3. the power of the working of faith to grow us in righteousness is proven by the Galatian’s (and our) experience: when they heard the gospel they received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as a result.

4. this gift of the Spirit through faith was predicted by God’s calling and promise to Abraham, particularly by the promise that he would be a blessing to all nations.

5. in contrast, those who live their lives by the working of the Law are under a curse rather than a blessing.

6. Christ’s death on the cross redeems us from the curse of the Law.

7. this illustrates the general principle that God’s promise to Abraham takes precedence over everything the Law says, including its curse.

So if the Law brings a curse to those who live by it, why did God give the Law to begin with? And since He gave the Law as a covenant, and since it’s terms are incompatible with the promise to Abraham, hasn’t God set Himself up to fail, to be unfaithful to the one covenant or the other? With this verse, Paul begins to answer the first question. Why was the Law given in the first place?

In the ESV we read that the Law was given “because of transgressions”, but this is not a satisfactory translation. The Greek phrase is τῶν παραβάσεων χάριν (the preposition χάριν ought to be called a postposition since it usually comes after its object). χάριν is simply the genitive form of the noun χάρις which means “graciousness”, “attractiveness”, “grace”, “favor”, or “goodwill”. Hence χάριν used like a preposition usually means “in favor of”, “on behalf of”, or “for the pleasure of”. It gradually became toned down to mean “because” and most English translations render it in its toned down form here. In this verse, I think the translators were taking the easy way out because the basic meaning of the word seemed problematic.

The primary meaning of χάριν may be problematic here but this tamer translation is more so. It all but forces us into an interpretation of Paul’s words that is probably not what he meant. χάριν is doubtless expressing the reason for the Law, but reasons come in at least two varieties. There may be a positive reason for an action, a goal that one desires to reach by the action; and there may be a negative reason, an undesirable eventuality one wishes to avoid by the action. The root meaning of χάριν is inherently the first of these, to express an intended or desirable goal, not the negative idea. In every other place χάριν is used in the New Testament, its object is a goal that is desired by the subject. In some passages like I Timothy 5:14 and Titus 1:11 the objects of χάριν are evil things that are desired by people with evil intent, but from the viewpoint of the subject the objects are desirable goals to the subject. So χάριν’s object probably expresses the desired goal of the subject of the clause, the Law, but when we read “because of transgressions” we invariably think of an evil to be avoided. The problem is that it seems strange that transgressions would be the desired goal of the Law. How could that be?

Passages from others of Paul’s letters say that God did view transgressions as the positive goal of the Law. He says it clearly in Romans 5:20: “Now the Law came in to increase the trespass…” He uses the word ἵνα in that verse, which implies the purpose of the Law’s coming was to increase the trespass. In short, I claim Paul means this: the Law was added to provide the proper growing conditions for sin, as strange as that may sound initially. For some reputable scholarly support for my view I can appeal to F. F. Bruce’s commentary on Galatians.

Admittedly it is entirely counter-intuitive. Doesn’t the Law do the opposite? Doesn’t God want the opposite? The second question will be dealt with as this letter proceeds, but let’s consider the first one now. Doesn’t a commandment forbidding adultery, for example, make us less likely to actually commit adultery just out of fear of the punishment (death by stoning)? Part of the resolution to this paradox is that Paul is referring to transgressions as matters of the heart and not necessarily matters of outward action. The Law may indeed have some power to discourage us from acting on our impulses, but from God’s viewpoint that was never enough. You may not be actually committing adultery, but if you wish all the more that you could, then it is simply not acceptable. It is the internal act of transgression that the Law nurtures and fertilizes. And the Law was given both to punish the outward action and also to foster, to nourish the inward conditions that bring it about. This surprising and puzzling purpose of the Law will be explained in the ensuing verses.

So the purpose of the Law was to foster transgression, against all our intuition. That is all very well, but it can’t be the whole story. God would surely not simply give the Law and cause us to fall further into sin and just stop at that. It would be senseless to think so in view of His character, which is perfectly righteous and hates sin. God might provide for the increase of sin on a temporary basis to achieve some greater and better goal, but not on a permanent basis accomplishing nothing that was good. It is obvious that He must have a higher purpose, a higher righteous purpose, that this fostering of transgression will accomplish in spite of how it looks on a human level. It is this higher purpose, and how fostering sin can get to it, that Paul will now begin to explain.

And the first thing Paul says to explain it all is exactly what we should have expected: the Law had an expiration date. If the Law was given to increase the trespass then logically there had to come a time at which trespasses had increased enough. God would then turn from increasing them to eradicating them. Therefore the Law, which had been increasing them, would have to be stopped. Paul is very clear about it. The Law was given until the Offspring came, the Offspring of Abraham to whom the promise had been made, the Offspring he had just identified as being Christ. The arrival of the Messiah was the sign that the Law had served its purpose fully and accomplished all it could do and was ready to be retired.

The Greek word for “until” is ἄχρις. It is used as a preposition here to denote the temporal boundaries of the action, the giving of the Law. The Law was given up to the time when the Offspring came to whom the promise had been made. From the moment Moses came down from Mt. Sinai, the Law was scheduled to expire when the prophet like Moses came down from heaven. In hindsight, if you study Moses carefully, Exodus through Deuteronomy, you can discern many hints that this is so. But the people at the time of Moses, and the people of Israel at the time Jesus came, did not notice those hints and did not expect that the Law would ever cease to hold authority. Jesus overturned more than money-changers’ tables when He came. He overturned most of our expectations.

There was one strand of Jewish tradition that divided human history into ages of about 2000 years each: first, the age of chaos; second the age of Law; third the age of the Messiah. After the age of the Messiah came the Sabbath rest, beyond human history. This tradition apparently had no influence on Paul at all. Though he had a tradition ready to hand that suggested the Law was only given until the age of the Messiah, he did not appeal to it. His argument is a theological one, and he always preferred to rely on deeper theological and biblical principles rather than clever numerological decoding. Probing the mysteries of the apocalyptic parts of Scripture never played any role in his thinking, it seems, and it might be better for us to follow his example.

Since the promise took priority over the working of the Law, as Paul had just argued, it was to be expected that when the Receiver of the promise came He would bring about the end of the Law. How He could do such a thing without also causing God’s covenant to fail is yet to be explained, but Paul is closing in on the crux (pun intended) of the issue. If the inheritance of righteousness came by the Law, it no longer came by promise; but it did come by promise and therefore, when the Offspring came to whom the promise had been given, somehow He would establish the inheritance in spite of the Law. Without despising the Law, and without ignoring the Law, and without opposing God’s will, somehow the promise would overcome the barrier to righteousness imposed by the Law. It was in the person of the Messiah that the two covenants would both be honored and both be fulfilled. It is clear that for Paul the Messiah answered all questions and tied up all the messy legalities and incompatible clauses of the two covenants. In Him the whole mystery of the divine purpose was made clear.

Paul goes on to give at least one reason, one of the hints I mentioned previously, by which we might have known all along the Law could never have been permanent: the way it was given. There was an essential way in which the Law was not fully divine in character, and therefore not eternal. The Law was not put in place directly by God Himself acting in person; it was put in place by angels. And secondly, it was not presented to the people of Israel directly by God Himself in person; it was carried to them by a middle man, an intermediary, an ambassador. Paul is contrasting, of course, the arrival of the Law with the arrival of the gospel of grace. The gospel, in contrast to the Law, was put in place directly by God in the person of the Messiah, who was not an angel but an incarnation (though it is perennially suggested that He was some created spiritual being like an angel). And the gospel is conveyed to each of us directly by the Holy Spirit and not by a mere man like Moses or some evangelist.

We should beware of a false dichotomy here. The Law is not simply purely divine or else purely human; we are not forced to choose one and not the other. Paul does not mean to say that there was nothing of God in the Law. His point is that the Law is a mixed bag, originating in God’s will for His own purposes, but established by human or other messengers. (I believe Romans 1:17 and 18 is making this same distinction between the righteousness/gospel which was revealed from faithfulness for faith and the Law/wrath which was revealed from heaven). The King Himself did not come to bring the Law; He sent viceroys and ambassadors to do the negotiating.

According to Stephen in Acts 7:35, the burning bush that Moses saw in the wilderness was an angel, though God spoke to him from it. Stephen also says that it was an angel who spoke the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai (Acts 7:38). Exodus 14:19 refers to the pillar of cloud/fire as an angel, and this may be what is referred to in Judges 2:1 as well. Further, Hebrews 2:2 refers to the Law as “the message declared by angels”. And it seems to have been a common rabbinic understanding of that day that the Law was put in place through angels. The Old Testament itself, however, is not always quite so plain. The first books of the Bible did not precisely distinguish between an actual appearance of God Himself and some other being sent to represent Him. The concept of angels was worked out gradually as the revelation proceeded through the history of Israel. In this verse of Galatians, however, Paul clearly speaks of angels as some kind of spiritual creature distinct from God, not like Jesus who was God in person.

The word translated “it was put in place” is διαταγεὶς, a passive participle which could be translated “arranged”, “ordered”, “commanded”, “directed” or “administered”; each one has been used by one English translation or other. I believe the best translation of διαταγεὶς is “administered” because I think Paul has in view the entirety of Israel’s history. It was not simply that the Law was given through angels at Mt. Sinai, but that the whole history of Israel was an administration of the Law overseen by the angels of God. They met Joshua as he was beginning the invasion of Canaan. They appeared to Gideon, to the mother of Samson, to David, to Elishah, to Daniel and Ezekiel, to Zachariah and finally to Mary.

The phrase “by an intermediary” is literally “by the hand of an intermediary” or “by the activity of an intermediary”. I think the word “mediator” is a better word to use than “intermediary” as the New American Standard does. Initially, it seems clear that the mediator was Moses. Moses was the one who stood between God and the people of Israel, who heard the Law from God and brought it to Israel and explained it, who interceded for the people. But again I think Paul had the whole of Israel’s history in view. Moses’ role was played on a less grandiose scale by the prophets who succeeded him. The New Testament refers to Christ as the mediator of the New Covenant in His blood, and Moses as a type of Christ, and Christ as the Prophet like Moses. They could both be called mediators, the one of the Law and the other of grace.

I cannot discern any distinction, in this passage, between the preposition translated “through” and the one translated “by”, though whenever Paul switches words there is the real possibility that he is making some distinction in meaning. Perhaps that is the case here and his meaning is too subtle for me. But at the least he is making this point: throughout Israel’s history, God spoke to them by angels and by prophets – that is, He administered His Kingdom in Israel through angels and by prophets; but in these last days He has spoken by His Son and by His Holy Spirit – that is, He administers His Kingdom today directly through His Son and directly by the Spirit. The gospel supersedes the Law both by being promised before the Law was given, and by being a more intimate and direct expression of God’s heart than the Law. The Law was a second hand message; the gospel was the message itself.

Galatians 3:20

Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one.

With this verse the interpretation becomes most tenuous. The great Bible scholar J. B. Lightfoot estimated that there were 250 different interpretations of this verse, and that was more than a century ago. More recently, F. F. Bruce does not come down in favor of any of the many interpretations of the verse, careful scholar that he is. But it is quite disappointing to pick up a commentary hoping for an answer and get a long discussion of the many options and not even a tentative conclusion. Far be it from me to have no opinion, and I will not leave you, the reader, in the lurch. Better to have an opinion you can accept or react against than stop short. I have not read all the 250 interpretations so I can’t say whether I have added a new one to the list or not. For what it is worth, here are my thoughts.

In this verse, “now” and “but” are the same Greek word, δέ, and it has a wide range of usage. Most often it is an adversative and should be translated, as the ESV does the second time, as “but”, “however”, “yet” or “on the other hand”. Secondly, it is used as a transitional word simply leading to whatever comes next; this use might be translated “and”, “moreover”, “then” or “now”. Thirdly, it may be used to introduce an explanation leading us to translate it as “now” or “namely”. This is how the ESV and most other translators take the first occurrence in this verse. Last, it can be used as an emphatic or intensifying word, to be translated “indeed”, “really” or “in fact”. Or it could be some combination of these uses.

Though the repetitions of δέ are in close proximity in this verse, Paul could easily be using such a word with two different meanings in the two places. Most English translations think so and I agree. In the first occurrence Paul seems to use δέ to begin an explanation; in the second occurrence I believe he is using it as a combination of adversative and intensifier, so I would make that second translation more emphatic: “Now a mediator is not one, and yet God most certainly is one.” This is all very well, but unless we understand what the word “one” means it does not make much sense.

We must take our clue from the preceding verse. If Paul is explaining something, he is clearly explaining the significance of the Law being administered by the hand of a mediator. This was the distinguishing mark of the Law as a covenant. No other covenant in the Bible was accompanied by a mediator; no other covenant in the Bible made room for a person like Moses. And why should they have? Covenants are essentially between two parties. Biblical covenants are between God and an individual like Abraham or David, or between God and creation, or between God and Israel. Marital covenants are between the families of the husband and the wife, or in modern terms between the two partners. Business covenants are between two merchants or two corporations. The ancient world did have something akin to our legal profession – a whole class of professionals whose job was to be mediators of covenants – but when God made a covenant He never called up His lawyer to arrange it. Except for the Covenant of Law.

This two party characteristic of the biblical covenants is, I think, the clue to what Paul means by the mediator not being one but God being one. The word “one” is used twice in this verse, but the English translation does obscure an important difference between the two uses: in the first instance the mediator is not one, using the genitive case; whereas God is one, using the nominative case. I believe “a mediator is not one” is an example of a partitive genitive, meaning that the mediator – Moses, in this case – is not a party to the covenant, that he does not belong to either of the two parties entering into the covenant. The mediator stands above, apart, outside the agreement being made; he is neither the party of the first part nor the party of the second part.

This is not so far-fetched as it may sound at first. A careful reading of Exodus through Deuteronomy does seem to picture Moses as the one individual not under the Law. Moses sanctified Aaron and his sons to be priests, and then sanctified the Levites, the Tabernacle, the altar and the ark of the covenant, yet Moses was never himself sanctified. Aaron and the priests all brought sacrifices to atone for their own sins before they brought sacrifices for the sins of the people, but Moses seems never to have brought a sacrifice for his sins. Aaron and his sons and the priests in general were all susceptible to ritual uncleanness and were required to bring the offerings for their cleansing; only Moses seems never to have been ritually unclean. No human being including the high priest could go into the Holy of Holies without the blood and the incense, but Moses went there at the beginning to arrange it and set it up. No human being, not even an animal, could go onto the holy mountain or touch it on pain of death, but Moses repeatedly went up to the top. Moses was truly a mediator for the Law in the most absolute sense: he was not a party to it, he was not subject to it, he was not judged by it. He was God’s lawyer to arrange the deal.

There is one more aspect of this verse that needs to be considered. If Moses “is not one” using the genitive case to mean “is not a party to the covenant”, why doesn’t Paul say that God “is one” also using the genitive case to mean that He “is a party to the covenant”? Obviously it is so, that God is a party to the covenants, all of them. Why does Paul switch to the nominative case? There is always the possibility of making much ado about nothing. Perhaps Paul didn’t have any particular purpose in mind by the switch. It seems safest, however, to assume he did mean something by it and at least try to discover what he could have meant. I propose the following: he used “one” in the nominative case because God was much more than a party to the covenant. He embodied the covenants by being both parties to the covenants at once. In every single case, God took the role both of giver and receiver. He is not simply one in the sense of being a party to the covenant; he is one in the sense of containing the entire covenant in Himself.

And here we have the most profound statement Paul makes in this verse, revealed in the grammatical case of this single word. Paul is not contrasting the two covenants, but is pointing to a similarity between them. God was Himself a party to both covenants, but as both parties and not merely as “one” of them. When the Messiah came, God became both parties to both covenants. With the covenant given to Abraham, the Messiah was the Offspring to whom the promise had been made as Paul had just mentioned. And with the Law through the mediation of Moses, the Messiah became recipient of the curse for us to redeem us from the that covenant, the Offspring to whom the curse had been made. It is an astonishing thing: God is both the beginning and the ending of all the covenants. And once we have done being dazzled by the truth, we see that we should have expected it all along.

“But God is one” means, I think, at least two very important things. First, that God is a party to the Law. He is a party to the Law in the sense that it originated with Him, He signed the contract with Israel, He created the terms and agreed to them. But God is also a party to the Law in the very way that Moses never was. God put Himself under the Law, He became subject to the Law, He was judged by the Law, He became Himself a member of the “party of the second part”. When He came in the flesh as the Messiah, God did what He did not ask Moses to do. In fact, He did what He does not ask any Christian today to do. The Messiah became party to the contract in order to complete the terms of the contract, to end the contract.

Let’s consider the impact of the covenant of the Law, the impact that a mediator made. When God gave the promises to Abraham, there was no barrier between God and Abraham. But the Law was given to Israel, not by God Himself, but by a lesser party acting on His behalf, mediated because the covenant itself created a barrier between God and His people. The Law created an enormous spiritual bureaucracy between God and Israel, with Moses, then the high priest, then the priests and Levites, then the people of Israel and very far away the Gentiles; and it created a corresponding physical representataion of that bureaucracy by means of barriers between God and Israel, with the ark of the covenant, then the Most Holy Place, then the Holy Place, then the altar and the courtyard, and then the Promised Land, and finally the coastlands, as Isaiah refers to the rest of the world. But God never intended such a bureaucracy to be permanent. God knew Abraham directly, like a son. God knew Moses, the mediator, directly, like a son. God knew the Messiah directly, like a Son. And now He knows us each directly, like sons and daughters. The whole spiritual bureaucracy of the Law has been terminated.

Let’s look at it from another viewpoint. Paul said that the Law was added for trespasses, to manifest trespasses, to bring them to light in all their varieties. The other side of that coin – though Paul does not mention it here – was that by bringing out transgressions, it created a great chasm between God and His people. The Law created the barrier between sinners and the holy God, a barrier that did not exist between God and His people until that moment. There had never been a problem before the Law came. There had never been the chance that God might break out and destroy His people until the Law came (see Exodus 33:2,3 for example). There had never been a question of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or Judah being qualified to come into God’s presence. They were simply acceptable to God, no muss, no fuss. It was only when the Law came that God’s people suddenly found themselves outside looking in, looking in to the dark interior of a Tent where they were not allowed to go on pain of death. Moses went in – the mediator could go in – but only those who were not party to that covenant could go.

Galatians 3:21

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law.

Paul had said that the Law had failed to bring the Spirit to God’s people. Paul had said that the faith of Abraham had brought God’s promises and that our faith and God’s faithfulness had succeeded in bringing the Spirit as had been promised. Paul had said that instead of the Spirit, the Law had brought a curse, but that Christ had taken that curse upon Himself and redeemed us from it. Paul had said that all the provisions of the Law were subordinate to the promises God had made 430 years before the Law had been given and, when in conflict, were over-ruled by those promises. Most damaging of all, Paul had said that the Law had been given to manifest sins, to bring them out of hiding, to make them multiply. And finally he had pointed out that the Law had not even come directly from God but by means of heavenly messengers. Paul had created an impression that could easily be taken the wrong way: that the Law had actually been working against God’s promises, that the Law had opposed them and even sought to overthrow them. Could that be true?

“Absolutely not!” he says. In Greek this is μὴ γένοιτο, one of the strongest negatives he could have used. His argument in chapter 3 had been making a subtle and a delicate point. Is the Law incompatible with the promise given by grace? Yes, completely incompatible. Is the Law opposed to the promise given by grace? No, not in any way. How then can the Law be both incompatible with grace, on the one hand, and yet not at all opposed to it on the other? I think Paul would phrase it differently: the Law was in complete agreement with grace even though it could not co-exist with it. Indeed, at its root, the Law must be in agreement with grace unless, at His root, God is something of a schizophrenic. The Law and grace have a complicated relationship that needs a bit of unraveling.

Since God is neither stupid nor inconsistent, He does not build up with His right hand and then tear it all down with His left hand, as Paul had accused Peter of doing when he confronted him in Antioch. The Law was not given for the purpose of getting out of keeping the promises, or even of delaying the promises. Indeed, Paul had already pointed out that the Law had no power to undo or delay the promises. The Law could not have interfered with the promises even if it had intended to because the promises came first and had precedent. Somehow, in a way yet to be explained, the Law worked to accomplish the promises despite being incompatible with them.

Paul explains. The Law tried to keep the promises, it tried to bring about righteousness the same way well meaning legalists of our own day try to do it. The Law tried to establish righteousness by forbidding and punishing unrighteousness, whereas the promise created righteousness out of thin air, out of nothing, creating it by the word of faith. After all, which is easier to say: “Let there be righteousness” or “Let there be light”? Law and grace both wanted the same thing; it was their methods that were totally incompatible. The Law never intended to oppose the promises of God, but the Law sought to accomplish those promises by the power of human will rather than by the power of God alone. The Law was an avenue by which men could themselves attempt to keep the promises God had given them. The Law was a highway to heaven and all they had to do was walk in it – the catch being that heaven turns out to be an infinite distance away. However far they followed the Law, they were no nearer their goal.

Here is exactly where the two covenants are most entirely at odds: only God can keep the promises He makes. This is the point at which the offense of the gospel resides. Are our works important? Are they important in our salvation? Are they important to God? The answer is both yes and no, but we want it to be only yes. We will get to the “yes” part of the answer later in the letter, but we cannot understand it unless we learn well the “no” part of the answer. Can our work, our human efforts, help to accomplish God’s promise to us? Can they help, even in the smallest way, procure the blessing of the Spirit to us? Can they help us get life? No, not in the slightest.

If the Law had in fact provided a way to fulfill God’s promise – to give us life, to give us the Spirit – then there would have been no problem, no conflict. If even a single law had been given among the hundreds contained in Exodus through Deuteronomy – no, let’s go wider: if even a single law had been thought of in heaven, if even a single law had been found anywhere in the imagination of God that could fulfill the promises, that could bring life, that could procure the Spirit, then that law would have been given and would have fulfilled the promises. And then there would have been no need of a Messiah. Paul had already said it in 2:21: “for if righteousness comes through the Law then Christ died for nothing.”

A law can bring about results only by means of our obedience or disobedience to it. Is it really true that every single law was disobeyed by every single person? Was there really no single law that we could obey, however pathetic, something small, say, like “Turn out the light when you leave the room” or “Don’t eat the fruit from that tree in the middle of the garden”? Maybe not, but I do not think Paul is talking about the inevitability of our disobedience. What if God had found a law so easy that we could all obey it? If something like that exists, some little something that could give us a foothold in the realm of obedience, some start at making ourselves righteous, and if we had all obeyed it, then would it have given us life? Surely righteousness can’t be that trivial a thing.

So what if the truth is darker than we supposed? What if there is no law that can make us righteous, that can give us life, even if we obey it? This is, I think, what Paul means: if even a single law had been found that, by obeying it, we could obtain life, then righteousness would have been by the law. Paul means, I think, that even perfect obedience to every single law would not have been enough to bring life. Paul should know. He had been blameless with regard to the Law (Philippians 3:6). He knew that even the perfection of human effort and obedience gets us nowhere. And therefore, if you foresee the logic that will unfold before us, it was the ultimate and inevitable failure of the Law to establish righteousness that was the reason God gave it. Why this is so will become more clear shortly.

The Law failed to give life, not only because of our total incapacity for obedience, but because the Law in itself had no power to give life. No law, no system of law however perfect, produces life. Life will not grow in that soil. The Law, even the perfect Law, does not have the proper nutrients to sustain life. The power of the Law is the power of threats, the power of fear, the power of guilt, the power of death. That is all the power that the Commandments have in us. That is the power wielded by legalism then and now, and we can see the symptoms in much of American religion. A religion based on punishment, guilt, shame and fear is futile and never leads to life.

So much of modern preaching concentrates on God’s wrath against sin. It puts the Ten Commandments in our court houses and public places, and with good intentions. It holds up the Commandments as the standard of conduct to be admired and followed, but just behind the beauty it reveals, just behind the awe we feel at its goodness, in the small print that goes just below every kind of law, is the hint of a growl, the veiled threat of the teeth waiting to catch the one who fails. The attempt to bring people into the Kingdom of God by giving a glimpse of the beauty of heaven while making them terrified of hell abandons all but the pretense of good news. If the good news, the gospel, is only the possibility of a way out of the bad news, then it is the bad news that sets the tone for all that we believe, that dominates our thinking and our faith.

The life of God is much more than the absence of death. Devotion to the Law, devotion to obeying the Law, is not devotion to Christ. If a single law could have given life, God would have used it; but it couldn’t and He didn’t. To go back to the Law is to put your hand to the plow and turn around.

Galatians 3:22

But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

In the next few verses Paul wraps up this, his second line of argument. He has a complicated loose end to tie: if the Law brings a curse, and yet was instituted by God, wasn’t God simply cruel to give it? If the Law’s purpose is the same as grace’s purpose and yet it inevitably fails to achieve that purpose and fails in such a way that it brings us pain, why did God bother with it in the first place? If the Law was given to enlarge or magnify the realm of sin – which certainly seems against God’s will – what was God thinking when He gave it? If God never does anything without purpose, without accomplishing something good, what did He mean the Law to accomplish? In short, if the Law was simply the wrong tool for the job, why did He insist on using it, and for so long? These are all questions that Paul himself creates by the way he presents his argument. This is the nature of the gospel just as it is the nature of truth in general: to understand the good news you must ask the right questions. Paul presents his arguments in such a way as to force us to ask the right questions, and then he presents the gospel as the answer.

The role of the Law in the history of the salvation of the world is a complex thing, and God’s strategy of spiritual warfare is counter-intuitive, more subtle than the most subtle of the beasts of the field, the serpent of old. The verse begins with ἀλλά, a strong adversative. What he is about to say is in sharp contrast to what he just said, that the Law was not opposed to the promises of God. He is not trying to back-pedal from what he just said, but certain caveats are necessary. Yes, the Law was not against the promises of God, but – as he had just said – the Law actually brought a curse rather than the keeping of the promises. The Law’s intent and purpose and goals were good, but … what it actually achieved was something very different.

Paul expands the focus a bit by speaking now of the Scripture rather than the Law. When he wrote this letter – the first of all Christian documents, as I believe – there was no New Testament. By “the Scripture” he meant the Old Testament, and nearly the whole of the Old Testament is either Law or the result of the Law. There is the Law itself; then the history of Israel’s relationship to the Law, their disloyalty to it and their exile and their restoration; and the prophets who came in the name of the Law as something like spiritual policemen to warn the people back from the judgment of the Law. Except for Genesis, the wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs), and many of the psalms, it is all about the Law. In short, when he changes the subject from the Law to the Scripture he was not enlarging the subject by very much.

Here he adopts a new metaphor, again choosing a negative metaphor, but this time a metaphor for the role of the Scripture, the Bible. The Scripture imprisoned everything under sin. The Greek word for “imprisoned” is συνέκλεισεν, a form of the compound verb σύν + κλείω. Alone κλείω means “shut”, “close”, “bar”, “block”, or “confine”. The prefix συν- has two uses; it can add on the meanings “together” or “with”; or it can be used to intensify the meaning. The result was a word that could mean “coop up”, “hem in”, “surround”; “imprison”; it was used of staged combat in the arena, “set together to fight”; and in a military context it meant “close ranks”.

The ESV translation – imprison – is probably the best, but any of these meanings easily fit into what Paul has in mind here. This was the word used in Luke 5:6 for example when the fishing nets caught the enormous catch at Jesus’ word; the Scripture/Law caught us like a massive swarm of fish in a net of sinfulness. The Scripture puts us into the ring like a boxer to duke it out with sinfulness; or better, the Scripture puts us into the arena like a gladiator to fight sinfulness to the death. These are not fair fights; sinfulness has us hopelessly outclassed; we are doomed. Or use another metaphor: the Scripture sends us to close ranks with sinfulness, soldier to soldier; but it is an army on a suicide mission. A little imagination can incorporate any of these images into a spiritual lesson and different images will appeal to different people. But from the way Paul continues his discussion in the next few verse, the idea of imprisonment or enslavement or captivity fits Paul’s usage best.

The Scripture imprisoned everything under sin but the “everything” he has in mind was all of Israel. The phrase is τὰ πάντα and in another context it could mean the whole creation, animate or inanimate, as in Romans 8. In this case the context restricts its meaning to the totality of Israel. It is the Scripture that is doing the imprisoning, not the Fall, not Adam and Eve in the garden, and the Scripture only addressed the people of Israel. God spoke to Israel in a way that He spoke to no other people in the world, and the Law He spoke to them imprisoned them all under sin. But the Gentiles knew nothing of the Scripture and were not imprisoned by it. They had their own human laws they could fall prey to, of course, but the divine Law did not come to them. Note, in particular, that the Gentile converts to Christ in Antioch and in Galatia, had also not been imprisoned by the Scripture. One of Paul’s concerns is that they would not be imprisoned by it in the future.

The word for “under” is ὑπό which also can mean “below” either spatially or to refer to a higher power or authority to which one is subordinated. The centurion in Matthew 8:9 was a man under authority who had men under him. So the Scripture imprisoned everything under the power of sin. This power is sin in the abstract, the concept and not the concrete acts that we do. It is better to translate it as “sinfulness”. Throughout this letter there has been, lurking in the background of Paul’s thought, the slavery Israel endured in Egypt. Their redemption from slavery was the formative event in Israel’s identity. But it is the Scripture, the Law, that puts God’s people into that slavery to sin. It is the redemption from the slavery to which the Scripture imprisoned Israel that is the subject now.

Could it have been God’s will to put His people into slavery? Yes. The slavery in Egypt was brought about by God Himself. He arranged for Joseph and the famine to get His people there. Then He left them for four hundred years as they were gradually enslaved. And then He delivered them. Why did He do it? Part of the answer is this: God sent His people into cruel slavery in Egypt so that He could deliver them before the eyes of all the world and proclaim His salvation. By slavery and deliverance from it He made Israel into a dramatization to the world of the kind of God He is and the kind of redemption He was planning for the world. He gave Israel a gospel to preach to their neighbors in the Middle East. He showed them all that He is the One who shows up in person to fight all other gods, all other powers, for the ones He loves.

I believe that Egypt was an allegory for the Law, that the slavery in Egypt was an allegory for the imprisonment under sin by the Law, that the deliverance from Egypt was an allegory for the deliverance from sin and from the Law. The Law played the same role in God’s revelation as Egypt. By enslaving Israel to sin via the Law and then delivering them from it by His powerful Incarnation, He showed the kind of God He is: One who shows up in person to redeem His people from the power of sin and death. It gave opportunity for God to display how far He would go to save the people He loved.

It was natural for Paul to adopt this event as the metaphor of Christian experience as well. Christians have always seen Jesus as a second Moses, redeeming us from death as Moses was sent to bring Israel out of slavery. So how do we sketch in the parallel between Egypt and the Law when we take the metaphor out of Israel and into the world? He delivered Israel from imprisonment under the Law and sin, but what about the Gentiles who were not under the Law, who were not imprisoned under sin? What are they delivered from if not from sin? We need to follow the implications of this passage a few more steps. There are two points we must understand first to make clear what Paul is saying.

First, we need to make a distinction between sinfulness and evil. Sinfulness is a human concept, a relative quality and not an absolute quality. The whole concept of sinfulness was defined by the Law and was given to the Jews only. But evil is an absolute quality and not a relative one; it is defined by the character of God and applies inside or outside Israel. I think Paul would say that we were all, Jew and Gentile alike, imprisoned under evil all along. In Israel the Scripture created the concept of sinfulness by the Law and then imprisoned the Jews under it. Israel’s slavery to the Law and to sin became a concrete representation of a more absolute and universal slavery of the whole human race to evil. The slavery to sinfulness is a concrete reality acted out in experience that reveals to us the slavery to evil that is much more difficult to understand. Making clear this distinction helps us understand what Paul is driving at here.

Second, it appears that the Scripture served only to worsen the condition of Israel, who alone received it at the first by introducing a kind of slavery where there had been none before. As disrespectful as it sounds, the Scripture brought a curse; but now we need not be shocked having already heard how the good and perfect Law of God brought a curse. There were other effects the Scripture had in Israel besides bringing them into prison; it gave great blessings as well. But there is no use denying what is true out of some mis-placed loyalty to our ideal of what Scripture ought to be.

Paul now gives the reason that the Law had imprisoned all of Israel under the power of sin: “so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe”. To continue with the way I have been translating this letter, I propose “so that the promise, by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, might be given to those who trust”. As in 2:16, the phrase “by faith in Jesus Christ” is, in Greek, ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, with “Jesus Christ” in the simple genitive case and no preposition for “in”; I think my translation is more natural. All of Israel, he says, had to be imprisoned under sinfulness by the Law in order that the promise to Abraham might be given to those who trusted the Messiah, to those who trusted the Offspring to whom the promise had been give. Specifically so that those outside of Israel who trusted in Jesus might be included with Israel. The end of Romans 11 is very much along these lines.

Consider the slavery in Egypt as an allegory for the imprisonment, the slavery, under sin. God took responsibility for both. In Genesis 15:13,14, when He made the covenant with Abraham, He said, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.” The purpose of their slavery in Egypt was to bring judgment on Egypt – by which He meant the gods of Egypt, and all the gods of all the nations through Egypt. The deliverance from slavery was fundamentally deliverance from slavery to other gods, from slavery to the elemental spirits of the world as Paul would later call them. Similarly the purpose of imprisonment under the Law was to bring judgment on slavery to sinfulness. The deliverance from sin was deliverance from the whole curse of the Fall. The promise given to Abraham was the promise of righteousness, a righteousness from before the Fall.

In the context of Gentiles coming into the Christian movement, the allegory I have drawn – the one I think Paul would have us draw – is very relevant. The question originally was: do Gentiles need to be circumcised in order to be saved? But Paul recognized, as he has made clear in this letter, that the wider agenda of the circumcision party was that the Gentiles had to submit to the Law as a whole, just like the Jews, in order to be saved. If we translate this question into the allegorical form, it becomes this: did Gentiles have to go into slavery in Egypt in order to be full members of Israel and participate in the Passover? Obviously not, though it was reasonable they should to an extent. How could they fully celebrate the Passover memorializing the deliverance from slavery without having that deliverance as part of their heritage? And yet one need not go into Egypt and experience that slavery in order to rejoice and celebrate deliverance from it. There are enough slaveries in the world of one kind or another to make clear what it means. In a similar way, the Gentiles need not be imprisoned under sin by the Law in order to fully appreciate what deliverance from sin means. There is enough evil and death and shame and guilt in the world to make clear what it means. This, I believe, is the essence of what Paul is arguing here, though he does not spell it out in this detail.

Now consider the modern context. The modern mentality of the West has nearly completely returned to its original pagan state. If you go up to a modern American on the street and ask, “Are you saved?” there is a good chance he will answer, “Saved from what?” We Christians have the impression we have to explain to them that they have violated the Law of God; we have to explain to them what sin is. We have the impression that we have to convince people they are sinners before we can preach the gospel. But that is exactly what Paul was trying to prevent in the churches of Galatia. If anyone would have been glad to tell the Galatians all about sin it would have been the circumcision party. They loved the Law, and in a certain sense they loved sin too because sin gives the Law its power and authority. But Paul earnestly desired that the Galatians, who were mainly from a pagan background, not be introduced to the Law, not come under the Law, not be introduced to sin. The Law, he said, just puts people in prison.

The “post-Christian” world today does not need the Law. The world does not need to be imprisoned under sin in order to receive the promise to Abraham. How do I know that? Because Abraham didn’t need the Law either; he didn’t need to be imprisoned under sin, he simply received the promise from God. That is the gospel, that is what we have to offer the world: the free gift of righteousness, of life, of the Spirit to anyone who will take it. There is bondage enough in the world already without introducing sin. There is vanity and death and decay and pain and cruelty. Everyone you know is already captive to some harsh master or other who drains their blood day by day. Don’t waste time giving them a new slavery. Tell them about the God who will show up in person to fight the demons they already know and take them out of the slavery they are already in.

Galatians 3:23

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.

Paul is now transitioning into the third part of his main theological argument. First it was that the Law had failed to deliver on the promise to Abraham. Then it was that the promise to Abraham takes precedent over the Law. Finally he will argue that when the promise is fulfilled then the purpose of the Law is over and it is no longer relevant. He begins by repeating what he just said but from another viewpoint. Verse 22 was from God’s viewpoint and now in verse 23 he says the same thing from the human viewpoint. In verse 22 Paul said the God-given Scripture imprisoned us – that is, Israel – under sinfulness; God gave the Scripture to put Israel in prison to their own sinful inclinations, with the purpose of making the promise available through Christ to all – in or out of Israel – who trust Him. Now switch to the human viewpoint. Israel was thrown into prison under the Law until the coming faith would be revealed. Drawing the parallel between these two viewpoints, and noting the particulars of where they differ, is most enlightening.

The best place to begin is with the word “faith”, πίστις. We have already noted some of the range of its meaning: belief, trust, faithfulness, trustworthiness, reliability, loyalty, commitment, and finally doctrine. In this verse it is usually understood as meaning the Christian faith, the content and doctrine of the Christian faith specifically. Now the particulars of Christian faith did not arrive until after Christ was raised from the dead. What gives me pause about this understanding is the way Paul identifies the Christian faith so closely with the faith of Abraham, particularly in Romans 4 but certainly here as well. Was Abraham, then, a Christian in embryo? The answer Christians give is “yes”, and I say so as well. But if so, the faith we share with him is not so much doctrine, which he could not have held the way we do except in a rudimentary form. The faith we share with Abraham is the God we trust, and not the system of beliefs we have about God. We share the faith of Abraham as being spiritually linked to him through a history of revelation. There is a continuity, an unbroken path between his faith in his God and our faith in ours, even though our understandings are quite different.

But our faith, shared with Abraham in the sense I just explained it, is not what Paul is talking about here. That faith, Abraham’s and ours, came four-hundred years before the Law, but the faith that Paul speaks of here did not come until long after the Law – until the Messiah came in fact. Now the Greek word, πίστις, can also mean “that which evokes faith” or “oath” or “promise”. I think the most logical way of interpreting Paul’s meaning here is that “faith” is Christ Himself. Christ is the personification, the Incarnation, of faith; He is that which evokes our faith. He is faith incarnate, just as He is the Offspring to whom the promise was made. It is as if Paul had said, “Now before Christ came, we were held captive under the Law, imprisoned until the coming Christ would be made known.”

Jesus Himself is the concrete object of our faith, not our faith in the abstract but our faith in person. Jesus was the appearance of God’s promise to us, He was the embodiment of the oath, so much so that Paul had just described the promise as “the promise by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ”. Thus we might translate the opening phrase of this verse as “Now before the Promise Himself appeared” or “Now before Faith Himself appeared”. The point of translating it this way is to emphasize that it was not our faith, our belief system, that appeared – as if there had been no faith up to that point – but it was the One who embodies our faith who appeared. Abraham did not see Him except as the hope of God’s faithfulness to him. And then his descendants were put under house arrest, protective custody under the Law, until He came.

This is no small thing to remember, especially for Protestants. There is a mentality that very strongly identifies Christian faith with the content of our beliefs rather than with the Person we believe. This results in a barely unexpressed idea that Christian faith was virtually non-existent until Calvin or Luther or Wesley or someone else came along. In a few easy steps we replace the Faith of Christians with the human faiths of present day churches. This very book could be used as such a substitute for true Faith – if it is as well-written as I am hoping it is.

I would personally make one other small change in the translation. The word “imprisoned” is συγκλειόμενοι, a present passive participle nominative plural, a form of the same verb he had just used in verse 22, modifying the understood subject of the sentence, “we”. The ESV separates them but it makes for a smoother translation if it is combined with the subject this way: “we prisoners were held in custody under the Law”. However, there is some disagreement in the ancient Greek manuscripts here. Some of them have συγκεκλεισμένοι, a perfect passive participle nominative plural of the same verb. The only difference is switching from the present tense to the perfect tense, from viewing our imprisonment as simply an on-going condition to viewing it as something accomplished in the past with results that have lasted into the present. The perfect participle is the better one from my viewpoint, but the difference hardly matters. It might change the translation to “we imprisoned ones were held in custody under the Law”.

What stands out in the comparison between verses 22 and 23 is that first the imprisonment is under sin, ὑπὸ ἁμαρτίαν, and second the imprisonment is under the Law, ὑπὸ νόμον. It is the same preposition in the two verses, though the ESV translates it as “under” in verse 22 and “by” in verse 23. It is legitimate, sometimes, as the context changes, to translate a single word in two different ways within a very short space – I just did so with the word for “faith”. But it is equally important to keep in mind the close connection between the two. Paul could have used different prepositions here, just as the translators did in English, but he chose to use the same one.

The thing to keep in mind is that Paul seems to be indicating that the agency of the Law is very like the agency of sin in the way we experience their control and power over us. However what is being done with the verbs in the two verses is somewhat different. In verse 22 what Scripture does to us is συνέκλεισεν; it captures, encloses, imprisons us all; but in verse 23 what we receive or experience is ἐφρουρούμεθα, being kept in custody, being guarded, a confinement. They are correlated, of course. In verse 22 the Scripture imprisoned us by sin; in verse 23 we were kept in custody by the Law. The Law is the correlative of sin. The one imprisons; the other maintains the imprisonment, keeps it going. Our sinfulness put us into the cell; the Law keeps us in the cell. As far as our condition, our experience, our imprisonment goes, they are partners.

It is this partnership between sin and the Law that is the crucial point here. Now, “partnership” is a strong word and implies more than we can let it get away with. “Partnership” may imply that sin and Law are allies, and that is not the case. The Law attempts to stop sin, to hinder it, to destroy it and sin breaks the Law. And yet, Paul says, the result of their opposition to each other is that they reinforce each other. Sinfulness breaks the Law, the Law judges sinfulness, and the result is that we are in prison. This is the way it always is. The crime makes the man liable to jail; the system of justice puts him there; yet crime and justice are mutual enemies whose mutual hostility results in disaster to the man. Without sinfulness, the Law is irrelevant and impotent. Without the Law, sinfulness does not even exist; it has nothing to define it or give it substance and form. This is the lamentable state that the Scripture brought us to until Jesus came.

In the previous verse, the imprisonment of Israel was effected in order ultimately to give all of us the same promise as was given to Abraham, the promise of righteousness by faith in Jesus Christ. In this verse Israel was kept in captivity only until the object of faith, Jesus Christ, came in person. The promise was the promise of righteousness, or as we might say, pardon for sin, amnesty. All charges were dropped as Israel received what had been promised. Hence when Jesus came Israel was released from the power of sin, and simultaneously, there was no longer need for a guard to keep them in custody. When crime was pardoned, the prison emptied, the guard lost his job. The arrival of the Messiah, the arrival of the Promise, the arrival of the embodiment of the faithfulness of God, procured release for the captives and at the same time ensured that those who had not been captives never would be.

I am anticipating what Paul is about to say, so let’s pause to recap. First, no one can grow in righteousness by the working of the Law but only by the working of faith. Why? Because the Law’s job is to keep sinful people in prison, but the working of faith begins by dropping all the indictments against us. Second, the power of the working of faith to grow us in righteousness is demonstrated by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that it brings; since the Holy Spirit refuses to be imprisoned, we cannot be. Third, the gift of the Spirit through faith was foreshadowed by God’s calling and promise to Abraham to include the Gentiles in it all. Fourth, in contrast, the working of the Law brings a judgment against those who try to live by it. But fifth, God’s promise and blessing to Abraham, like a spiritual Supreme Court, over-rules anything the Law says or does. Sixth, the Law was the servant of God’s promises but did not have the power to bring them about; and God knew it couldn’t. Seventh, God’s purpose in giving the Law despite its ineffectiveness was to make an opportunity for sinfulness, to fill the jails with prisoners, so that everyone would await the coming of God’s faithfulness as their only hope.

Galatians 3:24

So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith,

Paul now seems to repeat himself a third time. However, he again uses different phrasing so that he is actually presenting a different viewpoint on the same idea. Verse 22 had spoken from God’s viewpoint and verse 23 had spoken from the viewpoint of human experience; now Paul speaks from the viewpoint of the Law itself. Giving us three different perspectives on the one idea can only mean that the idea is one of the central ideas to our faith.

To put the idea from the Law’s perspective, he changes the metaphor he is using for the role of the Law. I have translated “imprison” as the action in the previous verses, which made the Law assume the role of the jail-keeper, the guard. But from the viewpoint of the Law, that was not at all its purpose. The Law did not come as an adversary to Israel; it came as an adversary to sin. So Paul changes the metaphor into a related, but more accurate, one to better describe the Law’s perspective on its job: παιδαγωγός, from which we get the word “pedagogue”. At that time, a pedagogue was a particular servant in a wealthy household, the servant who was assigned to a son to supervise his conduct, to make sure he got to school and attended to his lessons and grew up into a mature adult. The pedagogue was more a disciplinarian than a tutor, charged with seeing that the son learned honorable and responsible habits of life. Naturally, there would tend to be friction between the boy and his pedagogue. But as long as the son was not legally of age, he was under the authority of this servant. There would have been additional friction due to the fact that the son was technically the master of the pedagogue but was subordinate to him due only to his age. The pedagogue was technically his servant, but had power over him.

The closest we have today to this role is a minor with a trustee or legal guardian controlling all his inheritance until he reaches the age when he inherits it and assumes full control. The role of the guardian is much less negative than the role of a guard. The guard is there to punish and prevent criminal behavior, with no outlook beyond the penalty he inflicts. The guardian is there to help the son get through his irresponsible childhood and mature enough to be ready for his inheritance when he comes into it. The guard is socially the superior of his prisoner; the guard is a free man imposing his will on a man who had once been free but is no longer. The guardian, in contrast, is the social inferior of the son; he is an employee who assumes a temporary authority over the boy who will one day be his boss. The guardian and the guard both have real authority over the person in their charge; they can punish or reward, berate or praise. Outwardly the guard and the guardian may behave the same, they may be indistinguishable to an outside observer, but their roles are essentially different.

The word for “until” is εἰς and there is no Greek word for “came”; “came” was supplied by the translators because of the way εἰς was translated. It is a perfectly legitimate translation, but there is another possible translation that makes sense as well. εἰς could be translated as “for” or “serving as” (it is used this way, for example, in Luke 2:32, “a light εἰς revelation”). The pedagogue, the guardian, was a servant appointed to serve as Christ, as a stand in for Him. The Law performed its role for Christ, answerable only to Him. It was a substitute for Christ just as a nanny or tutor or guardian is a stand-in for the parents.

The ending phrases of the three verses are also parallel to each other. First in 3:22 from God’s perspective there is “so that the promise, by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, might be given to the ones who trust”; the second in 3:23 from the human perspective, is “until the coming Faithful One would appear”; now in 3:24 from the Law’s perspective we have “until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith”. These are all different ways of saying the same thing. Christ is the Faithful One who would appear at God’s time to keep the promises He had made. Christ is the one whose appearance we awaited, the one whose faithfulness we expected. Christ is the one whose coming would signal that Law had finished its work. The promise, by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, is the same as God counting Abraham’s trust as righteousness and this is exactly what Paul means by justification by faith. It is all one: the promise to Abraham was the gift of righteousness; the faithfulness of Jesus is His faithfulness to keep that promise. And the result is that when Christ came we were made righteous by the working His faithfulness. A person who believes in Jesus Christ today is standing in the same spiritual place as Abraham was when he stood outside his tent looking at the stars.

This is worth spending some time emphasizing. The gospel – that we have been justified by the working of faith apart from the working of the Law, as Paul stated it in chapter 2 – was the promise that had been given to Abraham. With Abraham it had not been spelled out so clearly as it has now been spelled out, but Paul has made a very convincing case, in this first letter of his, that the Christian gospel is not some new thing. It is as old as Abraham. It is what God had been doing all along, the way of salvation from the very beginning.

The two halves of this verse are connected by the Greek word ἱνα. This word may be used for three different possible connections between two phases. It can mean that the second phrase is the result of the first phrase; or the second phrase is the goal of the first phrase; or the second phrase is the purpose of the first phrase. Sometimes it hardly matters which way we think of the connection between the two, but in this case there is a significant difference that arises from how we understand it. Let’s use an example to illustrate just how distinct these three connections can be.

Suppose I join with some other people to form a bowling team. I could well say that we are forming this team ἱνα winning games. I may mean that winning games will be a possible result of forming the team. We will be glad to win, of course, but winning will just happen, and if we don’t win we are still OK with enjoying the game regardless. On the other hand, I could mean that winning games is the goal of forming our team. We are competitive. We don’t just want to play, we want to win, and if we fail to reach our goal, then we will be disappointed. On yet another hand, winning games may be the purpose of forming the team. Without the winning there is no point in having the team at all. Failure to achieve a result is not a big deal, failure to achieve a goal is disappointing; failure to achieve a purpose is total failure. The word ἱνα could be used for any of these situations.

Now this is only an illustration of the range of meanings the word ἱνα can have. What meaning does it have here? Let’s ask the question about the symbol that Paul chose to represent the Law. The Law plays the role of the guardian over Israel in order that – its result, or goal, or purpose – is to bring righteousness by the working of faith, first of all to Israel and then secondly to the Gentiles. If the Law fails in its task, will God consider it no big deal, or would He consider it disappointing, or would He consider it a disaster? Consider the image of the Law that Paul is using.

The Law is compared to a guardian. How do parents feel about a guardian failing in his appointed task of bringing their son to the level of maturity needed to assume his role as master of the estate? If their son comes of age and is not prepared to assume his duties, is it of no consequence? or is it disappointing? or is it a disaster? If the son grows up to be a fool, then the guardian is not simply a disappointment; he is a complete failure. When Paul chose to call the Law the guardian of Israel, it implied that it was the purpose of the Law to bring justification by faith – or as I have phrased it, it was the purpose of the Law to bring righteousness to Israel by the working of faith.

The whole purpose for the existence of the Law was to make Israel – and through them, the Gentiles – to grow to full readiness, full maturity, well prepared to receive the inheritance of the promises given to Abraham. Let’s say it in other equivalent words. The whole purpose for the existence of the Law was to make Israel – and through them, the Gentiles – to grow to full readiness, full maturity, well prepared to receive the perfect righteousness of God through the working of faith. And when the guardian, the Law, had accomplished its purpose, God was faithful to deliver the promises He had made to Abraham by sending the Messiah.

The Law was Israel’s guardian to get them fully ready for their faith to be counted as righteousness. The Law was Israel’s guardian to get them fully ready to grow in righteousness, not by the working of the Law, not by the working of the guardian, but by the working by faith, by the working of Christ’s faithfulness in them. And their readiness for the coming of the Messiah would somehow make the Gentiles ready at the same time.

We must be clear on one important point in all this. The Law was appointed Israel’s guardian by God’s choice. That means that the Law was exactly the right guardian for the right people. That means that, although the Law utterly failed to make the people of Israel righteous, the Law did not fail to achieve its actual purpose which was to get them ready to receive the righteousness of God as a gift by the grace and faithfulness of Christ. It was never the purpose of the Law to establish righteousness, and so it was not a failure in any sense. One cannot be judged a failure for not doing what one was not assigned to do.

Yes, everyone who lives according to the Law is under a curse. On a lesser level, has there ever been a child being trained by a severe guardian who did not consider that guardian a curse? The Law as a guardian of Israel is an analogy only. It is a much more serious thing to be an heir of all things, to be in preparation to inherit the Kingdom of God.