We Are Free: Galatians 4:1-7
Those whom God calls should be allowed to answer His call. It’s really a simple concept. If the Spirit moves, who am I to stand in the way? Why would I desire to re-imprison someone whom God has set free?
There is much to love about Paul’s opening argument in this section. Every child is under a guardian regardless of their social standing, economic standing, or gender. Children don’t inherently make good decisions. Children are self-centered. Children do what they want, not what is genuinely good. Ever hear of the Terrible Twos.
In the same way, humanity needed time to grow up. We needed to be shown how good civilization works and how self-centeredness breaks community. We needed examples demonstrating that a civilization we create according to our own ways is never as good as one created under God’s ways. This is why God made the Law. Abraham was shown the overarching promise; God then gave us the Law to help us understand how to do it.
The Law wasn’t God’s final move. God sent His Son to unpack His full plan. God didn’t intend for us to stay children. What parent doesn’t want their children to grow up? Babies are cute. Elementary school children are fun and full of energy. Teenagers have great conversations as they wrestle with the world. But it is pure joy when after years of work, tears, and mentoring they stop being children and become genuine adults.
God wants this for us, too. He loves watching us grow up and mature and cast aside our self-centeredness. He loves watching us care more about the needs of others and less about our personal desires. He loves seeing us take other people and help them grow. For us to fully embrace our spiritual adulthood, we needed something more than the Law.
God sent Jesus to be the vehicle allowing us to go from children to spiritual adult. With Jesus comes the Holy Spirit. Under Jesus, we follow God’s ways because it is who we are and not because some guardian says we must obey. We still obey the Law when we have the Holy Spirit; it’s just that we don’t need a guardian to mandate obedience.
In this light, return to the end of Galatians 3. When we look at someone and say to them that they aren’t dressed properly, or have enough money, or come from the right part of town, or have the right ethnicity, or even be of the right gender, aren’t we putting them (and ourselves) back under the Law? When we use any guideline besides the calling of the Holy Spirit as a determining factor of how God allows people to participate in His work, are we not choosing to return to life under the Law? Yet, we are heirs to the promise. God sets us free! Those whom God calls should be allowed to answer His call.
