After reminding the Galatians of the story of Hagar and Sarah and Ishmael and Isaac, and how Isaac was the child of promise, while Ishmael was the child of the flesh, Paul now applies the elements of the story allegorically to the believers of the true Gospel and the legalists in their midst.
Paul has chosen a story in which no doubt the Judaizers gloried: it was the chosing by God of their line, and the exclusion of the despised Arabs. This contempt continues unto this day!
But now Paul inverts the connections: he equates the Judaizers with slavery and bondage and Ishmael and Arabs. He equates the believers by faith in Christ's Gospel with Sarah and Isaac and the promise.
What an insult to the Judaizers, to compare them with the cast off Arabs, children of the bond-woman! They correspond to that child that was conceived by dishonorable, fleshly means. Their bondage to the law corresponds to the enslavement of Hagar.
Paul teaches that the truly noble offspring of Abraham come only by faith in Jesus. The offspring who are bound by the Mosaic law are the slave children of Sinai.
Then Paul degrades Jerusalem, and by implication, the temple itself, when he proclaims that they correspond to Arabia and slavery and the flesh. He takes all that the Judaizers hold dear and equates it with carnality, bondage, and the despised offspring.
Paul has already preached that the true children of Abraham and sons of God are those who trust in the promised sacrifice of Jesus. Now he makes clear the obverse: that those who trust in the law are the cast off, rejected children of Hagar.
The children of promise are all those who trust in the promise of Jesus' death for us!
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John Pittman Hey was born in 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, to Godly parents who from the beginning raised him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. With child-like faith he came to Christ on his fourth birthday at his mother's knee. He received his education at church...
