The Heart Of Paul’s Theology: Paul And The GalatiansSample

Paul’s Understanding of Law: Galatians 3:26-29

The false teachers in Galatia encouraged the Galatians to think of their salvation in individualistic terms. Their focus on circumcision and the stipulations of the Mosaic law had reduced salvation to an individual attempt to live righteously, and implicitly to earn justification, by obeying the law. In effect, men, women, and children were left to stand before God on the basis of their individual merit.

But Paul insisted that neither justification nor righteous living could be gained this way. Justification and righteous living had to come through union with Christ. In Galatians 3:26-29 Paul put it this way:

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:26-29).

The false teachers in Galatia actually taught that some believers in the church were better than others because everyone stood or fell before God on the basis of their own merit. But they were wrong. The truth is that we are “clothed … with Christ,” we are “in Christ Jesus.” Because we are united to Christ in this way, God looks upon Christians as if they were Christ himself. And because Christ is totally righteous and holy, justified and deserving of all Abraham’s blessings, God sees us as righteous and holy and justified and deserving of blessing too.

Once again, Paul’s perspective rose out of his eschatology. Paul taught that the transition from this age of judgment to the coming age of blessing takes place through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. By his own obedience to the law, Christ fulfilled the law’s requirements for all believers. By his death in place of believers — enduring the curses of the law on their behalf — Christ had fulfilled the requirement of the law that sin be punished by death. By his resurrection on behalf of believers, Christ and those for whom he died were vindicated by the Father as worthy of glory. As a result, when believers are united to Christ by faith, God looks upon them as if they were Christ himself, and on that basis considers them to have died to the curse of the law with Christ and to have been raised with Christ into the new life of the age to come. 

To follow the false teachers of Galatia was to reject this central role of Christ as the heir of Abraham’s promise — it was to require every individual to pursue the blessing of righteous living by his own human effort. But Paul saw Christ as Abraham’s seed through whom every aspect of salvation comes, making it clear that believers receive all God’s blessings only as they are joined to Christ.