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.