Paul uses an interesting analogy to illustrate God’s covenant promise. Paul continues with his study of Abraham as a means of communicating a deeper understanding of God’s grace to the world. Why? The false teachers were trying to use Abraham’s life to support their claims about the law.
Abraham was promised an offspring to carry on his inheritance. His wife Sarah was barren (she didn’t have any children). It must have been a lot of pressure to be the mother of a nation too numerous to count. Sarah, out of her desperation, gives Hagar (her servant) to Abraham as a wife. Hagar does have a kid but the problem begins with this child not being born as the answer to God’s covenant. Ishmael was born as a means to an end – man trying to force the hand of God or influence God’s will. Kind of like saying, “God, you promised so here is how I’ll get You to be faithful.”
God does not work in desperation! God works as He wills – and it usually is an answer to our desperation for Him. Think about it. God is not desperate to prove Himself. God is already revealed in His creation. God is not desperate.
We are not puppet masters who engage the will of God at the pull of a string. God’s grace and compassion move Him – not our desperation. Why? For God to work in our desperation would mean that God is not attentive to us which would go against everything about the Spirit. We are called to persevere not to be in despair. God sent His Comforter to remind us that He is with us always (John 14:26; Mathew 28:20).
Our own desperation or despair can cause us to act on emotions. Sarah acted on emotion as she approached the end of her childbearing years. God was not desperate; she was. She acted on impulse and tried to force the hand of God and would later laugh at God’s suggestion that a ninety year old woman would give birth to a son. Perseverance is a reminder that nothing is impossible for God!
Hagar and her child, according to Paul, represent being born under slavery to sin and to the clutches of the law. Man makes every effort to look righteous but the law is there to prove otherwise. The child born to Hagar was legitimate but was not born out of a righteous act of God. Man’s will was in this birth, not God’s.
The law is given to show us how far from righteousness we are and how far our efforts take us from that righteousness. I can live righteous all my life and never come close to God. God is the only one who can act to fulfill the covenant and on our behalf.
Once we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, we become children of the fulfilled covenant – God’s action within us on our behalf. We become like Isaac who was ridiculed and persecuted by Ishmael because Isaac was born into the promise. Ishmael receives a promise but did not receive the inheritance. Ishmael was born to a slave woman (with sin) meaning that he was also a slave (a sinner relegated to the law).
At that time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does the Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son." Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman. Galatians 4:29-31 (NIV)
Only those born in Christ – through God’s plan of redemption – can be really free as if born to the free woman (without sin relegated to the Spirit’s guidance). Those who are free are born by the power of the Spirit just as Jesus was. We are children of freedom; we are children of the inheritance!
- What does being relegated to the law mean to you?
- How does a Christian experience freedom through Christ?
- How does desperation move you closer to God?
- Does Paul’s illustration help you understand freedom in Christ from sin’s grasp?
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