For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.
For freedom Christ has set us free - "The liberty spoken of here does not refer to the kind of life a person lives, neither does it have reference to his words and actions, but it has to do with the method by which he lives that life. The Judaizers lived their lives by dependence upon self effort in an attempt to obey the law. The Galatian Christians had been living their's in dependence upon the indwelling Holy Spirit. Their hearts had been occupied with the Lord Jesus, the details of their lives being guided by the ethics that emerged from the teaching of the apostle, both doctrinal and practical. Now, I swinging over to law, they were losing that freedom of action and that flexibility of self-determination which one exercises in the doing of what is right, when one does right, not because the law forbids the wrong and commands the right, but because it is right, because it pleases the Lord Jesus, and because of love for Him." (Wuest)
"Christ died to set us free from sin, the law, religious tradition, and every form of bondage. He wants us to serve Him as the Galatians had once freely served Him—from glad, thankful, grateful hearts. To deny by our actions that Christ died to set us free is ingratitude indeed. This is why the apostle wrote that the Galatians were disobedient to the truth [v.7] ... People want to do things; they want to become accepted in the sight of God by doing their part, and the motive behind this is pure pride. They want to have the credit themselves. In their subconscious minds is the thought of being self-made men. Pride if the condition of the unsaved and it is always a temptation to man—even to the saved man. After men have been saved, after they have been justified completely and fully by the grace of God and the finished work of Christ, how often, like the Galatians to whom Paul wrote, believers desire to go back under the law again and to be in bondage." (Stam)
do not submit again to a yoke of slavery - "In the present passage the bondage immediately contemplated is to those rites and ceremonies prescribed in a law that could not give either freedom in the present or hope for the future, Hebrews 7:18, 10; but the principle is of the widest application. Human freedom, eleutheria, that in which man was originally created, is not liberty to do wrong or to indulge oneself, it is liberty to obey God. For man is so constituted that only as he pleases God can he be happy in the higher, the spiritual, part of his nature, and efficient for the great ends for which he was created. The essence of the Fall lay in this, that man used his endowment of freedom against the giver of it. Instead of enhancing and extending his freedom by his disobedience, however, man's first exercise of his will apart from God brought him into bondage to a new master, sin, see Romans 6:17, 18; 7:14, working through a threefold agency, the world, the flesh, and the devil; see 1 John 2:16, 17; 3:8. Thus sin is not the true master of men, but a usurper, ruling with rigor, albeit the rule is disguised so that not even the wisest seems capable of recognizing it apart from the teaching of the Spirit of God. Christian freedom is secured for men in the redemption of Christ, which is to reach its full fruition at His coming again, cp. Romans 8:21 with 7:24, 25. Meanwhile the believer is to claim, to assert and to enjoy, the freedom that is his in Christ, but in so doing he will encounter many opposing forces, and these the apostle Paul usually sums up in the word 'flesh.' Christian freedom is not liberty to the Christian to please himself; it is liberty for the new life which is his in Christ to develop in the leading of His Spirit, Romans 8:14, and according to its own nature despite the antagonism of the flesh, for 'the flesh lusteth against the Spirit,' i.e., the Spirit of Christ." (Vine)
if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you - "The words 'Christ shall profit you nothing,' must be interpreted in their context. Paul is not speaking here of their standing in grace as justified believers. He is speaking of the method of living a Christian life and of growth in that life. Thus, if the Galatians submit to circumcision, they are putting themselves under law, and are depriving themselves of the ministry of the Holy Spirit which Christ made possible through His death and resurrection, and which ministry was not provided for under the law. In the Old Testament dispensation, the Spirit came upon or in believers in order that they might perform a certain service for God, and then left them when that service was accomplished. He did not indwell them for purposes of sanctification. The great apostle had taught the Galatians that God's grace guaranteed their everlasting retention of salvation, and so they understood that he was speaking of their Christian experience, not their Christian standing." (Wuest)
"Those who had been circumcised, whether in infancy, as in his own case, Philippians 3:5, or voluntarily in later years, as in the case of Timothy, Acts 16:3, are not thereby shut out from Christ, they are warned of the danger of pursuing the practice in the case of new converts and of maintaining the teaching of which circumcision is the symbol. It is plain that 'receiveth' is not to be understood of the performance of the rite itself, for that could be done but once. There is here a metonymy: to 'receive' circumcision is to acknowledge it to be of divine authority and of Christian obligation, and in like manner to acknowledge all that for which it stood in the mind of the Jews." (Vine)
you have fallen away from grace - "In depriving themselves of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the living of a Christian life, they have fallen from grace. The words 'fallen from' are from ekpipto which means 'to fail of, to lose one's hold of.' The Galatian Christians had lost their hold upon the grace for daily living which heretofore had been ministered to them by the Holy Spirit. God's grace manifests itself in three ways, in justification, sanctification, and glorification. The context rules. All through chapter five, Paul is talking about the Holy Spirit's ministry to the believer. Therefore grace here must be interpreted as the daily grace for living of which the Galatian Christians were depriving themselves. But because they had lost their hold upon sanctifying grace, does not mean that God's grace had lost its hold upon them in the sphere of justification. Because they had refused to accept God's grace in sanctification is no reason why God should withdraw His grace for justification.. They had received the latter when they accepted the Lord Jesus. That transaction was closed and permanent at the moment they believed. Justification is a judicial act of God done once for all. Sanctification is a process which goes on all through the Christian's live. Just because the process of sanctification is temporarily retarded in a believer's life, does not say that his justification is taken away. If that were the case, then the retention of salvation would depend upon the believer's works, and then salvation would not depend upon grace anymore And we find ourselves in the camp of the Judaizers, ancient and modern." (Wuest)
"These expressions must be understood as explicit denials of salvation to those who, in the face of the apostle's statements of what was involved, persisted in acknowledging circumcision, and so committed themselves to the works of the law as necessary to justification. Only by grace, and that the grace of the Lord Jesus, Acts 15:11, can any man be saved. How then could they be saved to whom Christ was of no advantage, who had been severed from Christ, who had fallen away from grace? All such as turn to the law for blessing find in it only a curse, 3:10, above, condemnation and death, 2 Corinthians 3:7, 9, for the law of God 'worketh wrath,' Romans 4:15, but the grace of God brings salvation, Titus 2:11." (Vine)
"Christ's work was a finished work and it was all-sufficient for the payment of sin. If you are going to do something yourself for salvation, that indicates that Christ's death at Calvary was not sufficient. Then how do you know that any of His works satisfy for any of your sins? My friends, Christ is either everything or He is nothing! It is not partly His work and partly your work that saves you; it is all His work, as we saw in the strong argument about Hagar and Sarah. Paul asked, 'Do you not see that what was born of the salve girl could only produce bondage? The son of a slave girl could be only a slave boy, and there would always be that relationship. It must be a free son, a legitimate son, the son of Sarah. So it is with law and grace. The law can only produce bondage, and trying to keep the law can only produce slavery. Paul said that salvation is not bondage, but grace. It is not partly the result of your keeping the law and partly the result of Christ's work. You do not have to help God as Sarah and Abraham tried to do, to their own confusion and frustration. Christ paid the whole price for sin ... You received Him by grace, now go on in grace. You came to Him just as your were, at the end of yourself. You said, 'I give up; I believe Christ died for my sins, and I accept Him as my Lord and Savior.' All right, now continue the same way. You are no better in yourself now than you were when you were first saved. The old nature has never improved, so Paul said in Romans 6:11. The old man, the old nature, has died in Christ. Consider the old man dead, for this is how God views him. Put him out of your mind. Ignore the old nature and live unto God. Be all wrapped up in Christ, praising Him for His grace and the spiritual blessings He gives you in the heavenlies ... Paul had said of himself in Galatians 2:20 that he was 'crucified with Christ.' In Colossians 2:10 he said, 'Ye are complete in Him.' Our crucifixion, the putting off of the old man, the old body of sin, was done in the circumcision not made with hands when our blessed Lord and Savior was 'cut off' out of the land of the living. It is therefore through the operation of God, through the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, that we are saved and sanctified and accepted in the Beloved One, and pronounced complete in Him. Everything we need has been given to us in Christ." (Stam)
through the Spirit - "—pneuma is here without the article; it does not on that account follow that the Holy Spirit is not intended and that the capital initial is wrong, for the article is sometimes absent where the person is certainly meant, as in Acts 19:2, and is sometimes present where that is not the case, as in John 6:63. If 'in spirit' should be read here, then the meaning is that whereas the Jew sought justification in the flesh, i.e., by the observance of ordinances and obedience to moral precepts, the Christian is justified by an act of the spirit, i.e., through faith, as indeed the apostle states. If, however, as is equally possible, 'through the Spirit' is to be read, then the meaning is, 'through the agency of the Holy Spirit,' i.e., the believer is quickened by Him, and is taught by Him to cherish this hope, and is maintained by Him to continue therein. The Holy Spirit is received by an act of faith, and by continued exercise of this receptive faculty, faith, the blessings He brings are appropriated. Thus the whole spiritual life of the Christian life is a life of faith, life through the Holy Spirit. Whichever view of the passage is taken, it is important to remember that the sphere of the operations of the Spirit of God is the human spirit, Romans 8:16; 2 Corinthians 1:22. Every impulse along the line of obedience to the will of God is the spirit of a man is the result of His operations." (Vine)
we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness - "Paul says that it is through the agency of the Spirit that we can hope for the presence of an experimental righteousness in the life, not by self effort. The word we is emphatic. It is, 'as for us, we (Christians) through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith,' not as the Judaizers who attempted to live a righteous life by self effort rather than dependence upon the Holy Spirit. The phrase 'the hope of righteousness,' is a construction of the Greek text called an objective genitive. It can be translated 'the hoped-for-righteousness.' It is that righteousness which is the object of hope. The words 'by faith,' are to be construed with 'wait.' We wait for this hoped-for righteousness by faith. The word wait is from apodechomai. The same word is used in Philippians 3:20, and there translated look. The word speaks of an attitude of intense yearning and an eager waiting for something,. Here is refers to the believer's intense desire for eager expectation of a practical righteousness which will be constantly produced in his life by the Holy Spirit as he yields himself to Him." (Wuest)
"Here Paul is speaking of our desire for perfect personal righteousness. We all wish we were more righteous. Thank God that we are perfectly righteous in Christ, and now God wants us to live for Him out of gratitude. We live for Him because we love Him." (Stam)
neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love - "In the case of the one who is joined to Christ Jesus in that life-giving union which was effected through the act of the Holy Spirit baptizing the believing sinner into the Lord Jesus (Romans 6:3, 4), the fact that he is circumcised or is not circumcised, has no power for anything in his life. The thing that is of power to effect a transformation in the life is faith, the faith of the justified person which issues in love in his life, a love produced by the Holy Spirit." (Wuest)
For freedom Christ has set us free - "The liberty spoken of here does not refer to the kind of life a person lives, neither does it have reference to his words and actions, but it has to do with the method by which he lives that life. The Judaizers lived their lives by dependence upon self effort in an attempt to obey the law. The Galatian Christians had been living their's in dependence upon the indwelling Holy Spirit. Their hearts had been occupied with the Lord Jesus, the details of their lives being guided by the ethics that emerged from the teaching of the apostle, both doctrinal and practical. Now, I swinging over to law, they were losing that freedom of action and that flexibility of self-determination which one exercises in the doing of what is right, when one does right, not because the law forbids the wrong and commands the right, but because it is right, because it pleases the Lord Jesus, and because of love for Him." (Wuest)
"Christ died to set us free from sin, the law, religious tradition, and every form of bondage. He wants us to serve Him as the Galatians had once freely served Him—from glad, thankful, grateful hearts. To deny by our actions that Christ died to set us free is ingratitude indeed. This is why the apostle wrote that the Galatians were disobedient to the truth [v.7] ... People want to do things; they want to become accepted in the sight of God by doing their part, and the motive behind this is pure pride. They want to have the credit themselves. In their subconscious minds is the thought of being self-made men. Pride if the condition of the unsaved and it is always a temptation to man—even to the saved man. After men have been saved, after they have been justified completely and fully by the grace of God and the finished work of Christ, how often, like the Galatians to whom Paul wrote, believers desire to go back under the law again and to be in bondage." (Stam)
do not submit again to a yoke of slavery - "In the present passage the bondage immediately contemplated is to those rites and ceremonies prescribed in a law that could not give either freedom in the present or hope for the future, Hebrews 7:18, 10; but the principle is of the widest application. Human freedom, eleutheria, that in which man was originally created, is not liberty to do wrong or to indulge oneself, it is liberty to obey God. For man is so constituted that only as he pleases God can he be happy in the higher, the spiritual, part of his nature, and efficient for the great ends for which he was created. The essence of the Fall lay in this, that man used his endowment of freedom against the giver of it. Instead of enhancing and extending his freedom by his disobedience, however, man's first exercise of his will apart from God brought him into bondage to a new master, sin, see Romans 6:17, 18; 7:14, working through a threefold agency, the world, the flesh, and the devil; see 1 John 2:16, 17; 3:8. Thus sin is not the true master of men, but a usurper, ruling with rigor, albeit the rule is disguised so that not even the wisest seems capable of recognizing it apart from the teaching of the Spirit of God. Christian freedom is secured for men in the redemption of Christ, which is to reach its full fruition at His coming again, cp. Romans 8:21 with 7:24, 25. Meanwhile the believer is to claim, to assert and to enjoy, the freedom that is his in Christ, but in so doing he will encounter many opposing forces, and these the apostle Paul usually sums up in the word 'flesh.' Christian freedom is not liberty to the Christian to please himself; it is liberty for the new life which is his in Christ to develop in the leading of His Spirit, Romans 8:14, and according to its own nature despite the antagonism of the flesh, for 'the flesh lusteth against the Spirit,' i.e., the Spirit of Christ." (Vine)
if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you - "The words 'Christ shall profit you nothing,' must be interpreted in their context. Paul is not speaking here of their standing in grace as justified believers. He is speaking of the method of living a Christian life and of growth in that life. Thus, if the Galatians submit to circumcision, they are putting themselves under law, and are depriving themselves of the ministry of the Holy Spirit which Christ made possible through His death and resurrection, and which ministry was not provided for under the law. In the Old Testament dispensation, the Spirit came upon or in believers in order that they might perform a certain service for God, and then left them when that service was accomplished. He did not indwell them for purposes of sanctification. The great apostle had taught the Galatians that God's grace guaranteed their everlasting retention of salvation, and so they understood that he was speaking of their Christian experience, not their Christian standing." (Wuest)
"Those who had been circumcised, whether in infancy, as in his own case, Philippians 3:5, or voluntarily in later years, as in the case of Timothy, Acts 16:3, are not thereby shut out from Christ, they are warned of the danger of pursuing the practice in the case of new converts and of maintaining the teaching of which circumcision is the symbol. It is plain that 'receiveth' is not to be understood of the performance of the rite itself, for that could be done but once. There is here a metonymy: to 'receive' circumcision is to acknowledge it to be of divine authority and of Christian obligation, and in like manner to acknowledge all that for which it stood in the mind of the Jews." (Vine)
you have fallen away from grace - "In depriving themselves of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the living of a Christian life, they have fallen from grace. The words 'fallen from' are from ekpipto which means 'to fail of, to lose one's hold of.' The Galatian Christians had lost their hold upon the grace for daily living which heretofore had been ministered to them by the Holy Spirit. God's grace manifests itself in three ways, in justification, sanctification, and glorification. The context rules. All through chapter five, Paul is talking about the Holy Spirit's ministry to the believer. Therefore grace here must be interpreted as the daily grace for living of which the Galatian Christians were depriving themselves. But because they had lost their hold upon sanctifying grace, does not mean that God's grace had lost its hold upon them in the sphere of justification. Because they had refused to accept God's grace in sanctification is no reason why God should withdraw His grace for justification.. They had received the latter when they accepted the Lord Jesus. That transaction was closed and permanent at the moment they believed. Justification is a judicial act of God done once for all. Sanctification is a process which goes on all through the Christian's live. Just because the process of sanctification is temporarily retarded in a believer's life, does not say that his justification is taken away. If that were the case, then the retention of salvation would depend upon the believer's works, and then salvation would not depend upon grace anymore And we find ourselves in the camp of the Judaizers, ancient and modern." (Wuest)
"These expressions must be understood as explicit denials of salvation to those who, in the face of the apostle's statements of what was involved, persisted in acknowledging circumcision, and so committed themselves to the works of the law as necessary to justification. Only by grace, and that the grace of the Lord Jesus, Acts 15:11, can any man be saved. How then could they be saved to whom Christ was of no advantage, who had been severed from Christ, who had fallen away from grace? All such as turn to the law for blessing find in it only a curse, 3:10, above, condemnation and death, 2 Corinthians 3:7, 9, for the law of God 'worketh wrath,' Romans 4:15, but the grace of God brings salvation, Titus 2:11." (Vine)
"Christ's work was a finished work and it was all-sufficient for the payment of sin. If you are going to do something yourself for salvation, that indicates that Christ's death at Calvary was not sufficient. Then how do you know that any of His works satisfy for any of your sins? My friends, Christ is either everything or He is nothing! It is not partly His work and partly your work that saves you; it is all His work, as we saw in the strong argument about Hagar and Sarah. Paul asked, 'Do you not see that what was born of the salve girl could only produce bondage? The son of a slave girl could be only a slave boy, and there would always be that relationship. It must be a free son, a legitimate son, the son of Sarah. So it is with law and grace. The law can only produce bondage, and trying to keep the law can only produce slavery. Paul said that salvation is not bondage, but grace. It is not partly the result of your keeping the law and partly the result of Christ's work. You do not have to help God as Sarah and Abraham tried to do, to their own confusion and frustration. Christ paid the whole price for sin ... You received Him by grace, now go on in grace. You came to Him just as your were, at the end of yourself. You said, 'I give up; I believe Christ died for my sins, and I accept Him as my Lord and Savior.' All right, now continue the same way. You are no better in yourself now than you were when you were first saved. The old nature has never improved, so Paul said in Romans 6:11. The old man, the old nature, has died in Christ. Consider the old man dead, for this is how God views him. Put him out of your mind. Ignore the old nature and live unto God. Be all wrapped up in Christ, praising Him for His grace and the spiritual blessings He gives you in the heavenlies ... Paul had said of himself in Galatians 2:20 that he was 'crucified with Christ.' In Colossians 2:10 he said, 'Ye are complete in Him.' Our crucifixion, the putting off of the old man, the old body of sin, was done in the circumcision not made with hands when our blessed Lord and Savior was 'cut off' out of the land of the living. It is therefore through the operation of God, through the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, that we are saved and sanctified and accepted in the Beloved One, and pronounced complete in Him. Everything we need has been given to us in Christ." (Stam)
through the Spirit - "—pneuma is here without the article; it does not on that account follow that the Holy Spirit is not intended and that the capital initial is wrong, for the article is sometimes absent where the person is certainly meant, as in Acts 19:2, and is sometimes present where that is not the case, as in John 6:63. If 'in spirit' should be read here, then the meaning is that whereas the Jew sought justification in the flesh, i.e., by the observance of ordinances and obedience to moral precepts, the Christian is justified by an act of the spirit, i.e., through faith, as indeed the apostle states. If, however, as is equally possible, 'through the Spirit' is to be read, then the meaning is, 'through the agency of the Holy Spirit,' i.e., the believer is quickened by Him, and is taught by Him to cherish this hope, and is maintained by Him to continue therein. The Holy Spirit is received by an act of faith, and by continued exercise of this receptive faculty, faith, the blessings He brings are appropriated. Thus the whole spiritual life of the Christian life is a life of faith, life through the Holy Spirit. Whichever view of the passage is taken, it is important to remember that the sphere of the operations of the Spirit of God is the human spirit, Romans 8:16; 2 Corinthians 1:22. Every impulse along the line of obedience to the will of God is the spirit of a man is the result of His operations." (Vine)
we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness - "Paul says that it is through the agency of the Spirit that we can hope for the presence of an experimental righteousness in the life, not by self effort. The word we is emphatic. It is, 'as for us, we (Christians) through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith,' not as the Judaizers who attempted to live a righteous life by self effort rather than dependence upon the Holy Spirit. The phrase 'the hope of righteousness,' is a construction of the Greek text called an objective genitive. It can be translated 'the hoped-for-righteousness.' It is that righteousness which is the object of hope. The words 'by faith,' are to be construed with 'wait.' We wait for this hoped-for righteousness by faith. The word wait is from apodechomai. The same word is used in Philippians 3:20, and there translated look. The word speaks of an attitude of intense yearning and an eager waiting for something,. Here is refers to the believer's intense desire for eager expectation of a practical righteousness which will be constantly produced in his life by the Holy Spirit as he yields himself to Him." (Wuest)
"Here Paul is speaking of our desire for perfect personal righteousness. We all wish we were more righteous. Thank God that we are perfectly righteous in Christ, and now God wants us to live for Him out of gratitude. We live for Him because we love Him." (Stam)
neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love - "In the case of the one who is joined to Christ Jesus in that life-giving union which was effected through the act of the Holy Spirit baptizing the believing sinner into the Lord Jesus (Romans 6:3, 4), the fact that he is circumcised or is not circumcised, has no power for anything in his life. The thing that is of power to effect a transformation in the life is faith, the faith of the justified person which issues in love in his life, a love produced by the Holy Spirit." (Wuest)
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