Coming Of Age
COMING OF AGE
GALATIANS 4:1-7
Paul shows the great benefits gained for us by Christ’s coming into the world.
Paul’s earlier discussion was summed up in 3:28. He has shown that God’s unconditional promise to Abraham has found its realization in the coming of Christ, the true “seed of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), but Christ is not a solitary person; rather he is an inclusive personality who as “the corporate Christ” possesses a people who also are the rightful heirs of the promise (3:29).
The next paragraph naturally considers what heirship means. The contrast is a direct one between “slaves” and “sons” (4:7). The former word aptly describes the restrictions placed on an underage child, although it doesn’t say anything about the cruelty and finality which slaves endured in the first-century world. Rather, Paul fastens on the single point of comparison: both a slave and a child are under the will of another person (4:1-2). In the case of men and women before their conversion, this lordship imposed a very real bondage (4:3).
Christ came to be a liberator (4:4). In God’s good time, he took our nature and shared our human experiences, voluntarily placing himself in subjection to those foreign forces which tyrannized people in the first-century religious world (“the elemental spirits of the universe,” 4:3). But the effect of this identification, made for our good, was a happy one, for by it we are set free and welcomed into God’s family (4:5) as his mature children, no longer under the care of a guardian and in the grip of fear.
Some of the characteristics of the new liberty that Jesus Christ brought are given in 4:5-7: adoption as his sons; the witness of the Holy Spirit in our hearts; and our entry upon an inheritance—those are the great benefits secured to us by Christ’s coming into the world as its redeemer.
Notes 4:3: Paul’s term means either first or “basic moral principles” (JBP), a meaning paralleled in Hebrews 5:12 and referring to the imperfect apprehension of divine truth before Christ’s coming, or “spiritual forces of the universe,” cosmic powers in astrology which were identified with the stars and were thought to rule and enslave people’s lives (Colossians 2:8,20). 4:9 tips the scales in favor of the latter view, and “if the Galatians had been pagans before conversion [as 4:8 makes obvious], then such astrological speculation would have formed part of their religious system” (Cole). 4:6: “Abba,” literally, “dear father”—a child’s name for his parent which Jesus both used and taught his disciples to use (Mark 14:32-39; Luke 11:2-4).