Verses 21-31 provide a biblical illustration of law and grace. Paul produces a final rebuttal of legalism by giving an allegorical interpretation of Abraham and his difficulties with his two wives and two sons. In a masterful move, Paul turned to a scriptural illustration to conclude his theological defense of justification by faith. An Old Testament story from the life of Abraham enabled Paul to review what he had already declared about contrasts between the Mosaic Law and grace, between works and faith. It also provided an opportunity for him to verbalize the pointed charge to the Galatians that they should cast out the legalizers (v. 30).
The theme of Christian freedom that is especially prominent in the last two chapters is anticipated here by the contrast between Hagar the slave and Sarah the free woman.
21 Tell me, you who want to be under law, do you not listen to the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. 23 But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise. 24 This is allegorically speaking, for these women are two covenants: one proceeding from Mount Sinai bearing children who are to be slaves; she is Hagar. 25 Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother. 27 For it is written,
“Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear;
Break forth and shout, you who are not in labor;
For more numerous are the children of the desolate
Than of the one who has a husband.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Abraham, the two wives, and the two sons represent spiritual realities; and their relationships teach us important lessons.
- Ishmael was Abraham’s son by proxy, according to the flesh; Isaac was his son by promise, a living witness to divine grace.
- The advent of Christ and the coming of His Spirit have inaugurated the “last days.” However, we must not collapse the future restoration God has promised into some kind of ethereal, realized eschatology. The heavenly Jerusalem is still above; it has not yet descended to earth. Only as we look forward in prayerful expectancy to the completion of God’s plan for the ages are we enabled to take our places on the front lines of the cosmic battle raging all around us in this “present evil age.”
CLOSER LOOK:
Paul starts by describing the historical facts in verses 21–23.
Verse 21: The Galatians had not yet submitted to the bondage of the Law but they desired to. Paul desperately wanted to stop them and turn them back to a life under grace. As a transition to what would immediately follow, he challenged the Galatians to “listen to” (akouō)[1] or to understand what the Law really said.
Verse 22: Once again Paul speaks of the law and the experience of Abraham, addressing the false teachers’ foundational respect for Abraham (3:6-9) and the Galatians’ infatuation with living under the law. By turning again to Abraham ( and to Genesis, as one of the Books of Moses, was considered a part of the Law)[2] Paul was appealing to the founder of the Jewish nation from whose physical descent the Jews traced their blessings. John the Baptist and Jesus declared that physical descent from Abraham was not enough, however, to guarantee spiritual blessing (cf. Matt. 3:9; John 8:37–44). To clinch his lengthy argument about the bondage of the law and the freedom found in Christ, Paul uses as examples the two sons of Abraham. Paul reminded his readers that Abraham “had two sons” (those born later are not important to his illustration; but for those that want to know, Abraham had a total of eight sons, six of them by Keturah (Gen 25:1–2), whom he married after Sarah’s death), and that they should consider which of the two they were most like. One son, Isaac, was born of Sarah, the rightful wife of Abraham and “the free woman”; the other, Ishmael, was born of Hagar, the “bondwoman” (or slave woman). According to ancient law and custom the status of a mother affected the status of her son.
Appropriately, Paul counters the Jewish false teachers’ zeal for the law with an argument based on the Law, the Pentateuch (Gen 16:15; 21:2). He uses allegory to prove his point because it was a rhetorical technique the false teachers used. In other words, Paul was demonstrating that he could argue from the Law just as well as they could, but to prove that the Law of Moses pointed to the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Verse 23: A second contrast concerned the manner in which the sons were conceived. Ishmael “was born according to the flesh,” that is, in the course of nature and requiring no miracle and no promise of God. In Genesis 16, Abraham and Sarah attempted to fulfill God’s promise through their own strength, using Hagar, a bondwoman. Isaac, on the other hand, was born as the result of “the promise.” In spite of the complications caused by that fleshly alternative, Sarah, a “free woman,” eventually saw the miraculous outworking of God’s promise in the birth of Isaac. Abraham and Sarah were beyond the age of childbearing, but God miraculously fulfilled His promise in bringing life out of the “deadness of Sarah’s womb” (cf. Rom. 4:18–21).
b. The allegorical interpretation (4:24–27)
Paul was using the common Jewish allegorical method of the day to make his point. In order to emphasize the contrast between Law and grace Paul next used the historical events of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar as an allegory, that is, he treated those two mothers figuratively (allēgoroumena). He did not in any sense deny the literal meaning of the story of Abraham, but he declared that that story, especially the matters relating to the conception of the two sons, had an additional meaning. Thus, he compared the narrative to the conflict between Judaism and Christianity.
Perhaps the most famous allegory in the Christian world is John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, in which Bunyan traces Christian’s experiences from the City of Destruction to heaven. In an allegory, persons and actions represent hidden meanings, so that the narrative can be read on two levels: the literal and the symbolic. Allegorical exegesis was a common form of literary analysis in the Hellenistic world. The ancient stories of Homer had been allegorized by the Greeks just as the Old Testament texts were treated in a similar fashion by Jewish scholars of the diaspora, the most notable of whom was Philo of Alexandria.
NOTE: This “allegorizing” is vastly different from the practice of “allegorical interpretation”—followed by Origen, Augustine, and many others down through the ages and into the present day—in which the historical facts are relegated to a lower, less significant level and fanciful, hidden meanings unrelated to the text, are considered vastly more important.[3]
Paul’s use of Genesis in this section does not give us license to find “hidden meanings” in all the events of the Old Testament. If we take that approach to the Bible, we can make it mean almost anything we please. This is the way many false teachings arise. The Holy Spirit inspired Paul to discern the hidden meaning of the Genesis story. We must always interpret the Old Testament in the light of the New Testament, and where the New Testament gives us permission, we may search for hidden meanings.[4] Otherwise, if we do not accept the plain statements of Scripture, we run the danger of trying to “spiritualize” everything. Obviously the topic of prophetic interpretation is a whole different story and we will not even attempt to touch it here.
In contrast to allegorical interpretations, typological exegesis “seeks to discover a correspondence between people and events of the past and of the present or future.… [It is] based on the conviction that certain events in the history of Israel prefigure a future time when God’s purposes will be revealed in their fullness. In other words, a “type” is a kind of prophetic foreshadowing by one historical event of another yet to come. Thus there is a typological, but not an allegorical, correspondence between the brazen serpent Moses erected in the wilderness and the cross on which Jesus was impaled (Num 21:8–9; John 3:14).
Verse 24: First, Paul pointed to “two covenants.” Paul used this allegorical approach to draw a stark contrast between two biblical covenants at odds with each other in the churches in Galatia: the Abrahamic promise and the Law of Moses that God gave Israel at Mount Sinai. One, the Mosaic, had its origin at Mount Sinai. Those under this legal covenant were “slaves.” As Hagar brought forth a slave, so does the Law. At this point the reader is expected to understand and supply the implicit reference to the Abrahamic Covenant, a gracious system represented by Sarah which through its messianic promise brought forth children who are free.
Verses 25–26: Next, Paul pointed to two Jerusalems. Hagar also stood for the first-century (“present”) city of Jerusalem, a city enslaved to Rome and in slavery to the Law. Paul compared Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life, to Mount Sinai, the birthplace of the Law of Moses. Sarah, on the other hand, corresponded to the “Jerusalem above,” the mother of all the children of grace. This heavenly city, which Revelation 21:2 says one day will come to earth (dispensationalist and covenant theologians see this differently), is now the “city of the living God” (cf. Heb. 12:22), the home of departed believers of all ages. Since “our” obviously refers to those who are free through faith in Christ (v. 7), Paul was strongly implying that the question at hand was not allegiance to Jerusalem, but allegiance to which Jerusalem—the new or the old? Would the Galatians follow the shortsighted present Jerusalem and its legalism or the liberty of the heavenly Jerusalem?
Verse 27: The quotation from Isaiah 54:1 prophesied the changing fortunes of Israel, which Paul applied to Sarah’s history. Israel before her Babylonian Captivity was likened to a woman with a husband. The barren woman was Israel in Captivity. The woman bearing more children may have pictured Israel restored to the land after the Exile, but more particularly it portrays her millennial blessings. Paul applied this passage (he did not claim it was fulfilled) in this context to Sarah, who though previously barren, was later blessed with a child, and who would ultimately enjoy a greater progeny than Hagar.
As you think about all of this, and re-read Genesis 21:1-12, we discover some wonderful spiritual truths about our salvation:
| The Old Covenant | The New Covenant |
| Law | Grace |
| Hagar the slave | Sarah the freewoman |
| Ishmael, conceived after the flesh | Isaac, conceived miraculously |
| Earthly Jerusalem in bondage | Heavenly Jerusalem which is free |
Isaac illustrates the believer in several particulars, which will see more of in the next section
[1] BDAG – “to hear and understand a message, understand.” Some translate this as be aware of
[2] Donald K. Campbell, “Galatians,” in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, eds. John F. Walvoord and Roy B. Zuck, vol. 2 (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1985), 602.
[3] Donald K. Campbell, “Galatians,” in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, eds. John F. Walvoord and Roy B. Zuck, vol. 2 (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1985), 602.
[4] Warren Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1989), n.p.