Galatians 3:21-25

CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES

Galatians 3:22. The Scripture hath concluded all under sin.—The written letter was needed so as permanently to convict man of disobedience to God’s command. He is shut up under condemnation as in a prison.

Galatians 3:24. The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ.—As a tutor, checking our sinful propensities, making the consciousness of the sinful principle more vivid, and showing the need of forgiveness and freedom from the bondage of sin.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Galatians 3:21

The True Use of the Law—

I. Was not intended to bestow spiritual life.—“If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law” (Galatians 3:21). The law was not against the promises. It was a divine method in dealing with man, and one divine method never conflicts with another. It was intended to mediate between the promise and its fulfilment. It is not the enemy but the minister of grace. It did not profess to bestow spiritual life; but in its sacrifices and oblations pointed to the coming Christ who is “the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Romans 10:4).

II. Was to reveal the universal domination of sin.—“The Scripture hath concluded all under sin” (Galatians 3:22). The Bible from the beginning and throughout its course, in its unvarying teaching, makes the world one vast prison-house, with the law for gaoler, and mankind held fast in chains of sin, condemned, and waiting for the punishment of death. Its perpetual refrain is, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Its impeachment covers the whole realm of human life, thought, and desire. “Every human life,” says Martensen, “that has not yet become a partaker of redemption is a life under the law, in opposition to the life under grace. The law hovers over his life as an unfulfilled requirement; and, in the depth of his own being, remains as an indismissible but unsatisfied and unexpiated claim on him, which characterises such a human existence as sinful and guilt-laden.”

III. Was to teach the absolute necessity of faith in order to escape its condemnation.—“But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed” (Galatians 3:23). The law was all the while standing guard over its subjects, watching and checking every attempt to escape, but intending to hand them over in due time to the charge of faith. The law posts its ordinances, like so many sentinels, round the prisoner’s cell. The cordon is complete. He tries again and again to break out; the iron circle will not yield. But deliverance will yet be his. The day of faith approaches. It dawned long ago in Abraham’s promise. Even now its light shines into his dungeon, and he hears the word of Jesus, “Thy sins are forgiven thee; go in peace.” Law, the stern gaoler, has after all been a good friend if it has reserved him for this. It prevents the sinner escaping to a futile and illusive freedom (Findlay).

IV. Was to act as a moral tutor to train us to the maturity and higher freedom of a personal faith in Christ.—“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ,” etc. (Galatians 3:24). The schoolmaster, or pedagogue, among the Greeks meant a faithful servant entrusted with the care of the boy from childhood, to keep him from evil, physical and moral, and accompany him to his amusements and studies. “If then the law is a pedagogue,” says Chrysostom, “it is not hostile to grace, but its fellow-worker; but should it continue to hold us fast when grace has come, then it would be hostile.” Judaism was an education for Christianity. It trained the childhood of the race. It humbled and distressed the soul with the consciousness of sin. It revealed the utter inadequacy of all its provisions to justify. It brought the despairing soul to Christ, and showed that the true way to righteousness was by personal faith in Him.

Lessons.—

1. Law is the revealer of sin.

2. Law demands universal righteousness.

3. Law is a training for faith.

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES

Galatians 3:21. The Law not contrary to the Divine Promise.—

1. It is the way of some to make one Scripture contradict another, yet their bold allegations will be found always false, and truth to be ever most consonant and never contrary to itself.
2. So exact and full is the righteousness required in order to life, and so far short do all mankind come of it, that no works of our own, done in obedience to the law, can amount to that righteousness.
3. Though all men by nature be under sin, it is a matter of no small difficulty to convince any man of it. The work of the law, accusing, convincing, or condemning the sinner, is compared to the work of a judge detaining a malefactor in prison which is not effectuated but with force and violence.
4. The law by its threatenings prepares and necessitates the soul to embrace salvation by faith in the Christ revealed in the promise.—Fergusson.

Galatians 3:22. The Great Prison; or, All concluded under Sin.—

1. Satan does indeed draw and drive men into sin—this is the accursed work of his restless, sabbathless life; and when he has got them there he binds them fast, and will not let them flee from his toils. He builds a high wall of sin all round them so that they shall not look over it into the goodly land beyond, and here he shuts them up together, sinner with sinner, a never-ending ghastly multitude, that they may encourage and pamper each other in wickedness, and that no example, no voice of holiness, may ever reach and startle them. But God never drove, never drew, any man into sin. He is calling us to come out from the deadly land, from the loathsome, plague-breathing dungeon. So when the Scripture concludes, or shuts all men up together under sin, it is not by driving them into sin, but for the sake of calling them out of it.
2. With all the light of the Scriptures shining around us, with the law of God ever sounding in our ears, and the life of Christ set continually before us, how prone are we to forget our sinfulness, to turn away from the thought of it, to fancy we are as good as we need be, and that, though we might certainly be better, yet it does not matter much! How apt are we still to forget that we are concluded under sin, to forget that we are shut up in a prison! Although the souls of so many millions are lying around us, bloated with the poison of sin, how tardily do we acknowledge that the poison by which they perished must also be deadly to us!
3. Suppose you were to be carried before an earthly court of justice, and that one sweeping accusation were to be brought against you; suppose you were found guilty, and the excuse you set up were the complete proof of your guilt,—what would follow? The judge would straightway pass sentence upon you, and you would be condemned to suffer punishment according to the measure of your offence. And must we not expect that the course of things should be the very same when you are carried before a heavenly court of justice?
4. When a man’s eyes are opened to see the prison in which he is shut up, to see and feel the chains that are fast bound round his soul and have eaten into it; when he has learnt to see and know that the pleasures, whatever they may be, of sin are only, like the flesh-pots of Egypt, intoxicating drugs, given to him to deprive him of all sense of his captivity,—then will he long for a deliverer, rejoice on hearing of his approach, hail him when he comes in view, and follow him whithersoever he may lead. As unbelief is the one great universal sin, in which all mankind are concluded, as it is only from having let slip our faith in God that we have yielded our hearts to the temptations of the world and given ourselves up to its idolatries, so it is only through faith that we can be brought back to God—that we can receive the promise given to those who believe.—J. C. Hare.

Galatians 3:23. “Shut up unto the faith.” The Reasonableness of Faith.—The mode of conception is military. The law is made to act the part of a sentry, guarding every avenue but one, and that one leads those, who are compelled to take it, to the faith of the gospel. Out of the leading varieties of taste and sentiment which obtain in the present age we may collect something which may be turned into an instrument of conviction for reclaiming men from their delusions and shutting them up to the faith.

I. There is the school of natural religion.—It is founded on the competency of the human mind to know God by the exercise of its own faculties, to clothe Him in the attributes of its own demonstration, to serve Him by a worship and a law of its own discovery, and to assign to Him a mode of procedure in the administration of this vast universe upon the strength and plausibility of its own theories. They recognise the judicial government of God over moral and accountable creatures. They hold there is a law. One step more, and they are fairly shut up to the faith. That law has been violated.

II. There is the school of classical morality.—It differs from the former school in one leading particular. It does not carry in its speculations so distinct and positive a reference to the Supreme Being. Our duties to God are viewed as a species of moral accomplishment, the effect of which is to exalt and embellish the individual. We ask them to look at man as he is, and compare him with man as they would have him to be. If they find that he falls miserably short of their ideal standard of excellence, what is this but making a principle of their own the instrument of shutting them up unto the faith of the gospel, or at least shutting them up unto one of the most peculiar of its doctrines, the depravity of our nature, or the dismal ravage which the power of sin has made upon the moral constitution of the species? This depravity the gospel proposes to do away.

III. There is the school of fine feeling and poetical sentiment.—It differs from the school of morality in this—the one makes virtue its idol because of its rectitude, the other makes virtue its idol because of its beauty, and the process of reasoning by which they are shut up unto the faith is the same in both. However much we may love perfection and aspire after it, yet there is some want, some disease, in the constitution of man which prevents his attainment of it, that there is a feebleness of principle about him, that the energy of his practice does not correspond to the fair promises of his fancy, and however much he may delight in an ideal scene of virtue and moral excellence, there is some lurking malignity in his constitution which, without the operation of that mighty power revealed to us in the gospel, makes it vain to wish and hopeless to aspire after it.—Dr. Thomas Chalmers.

Galatians 3:24. The Law our Schoolmaster.—There was a time when God put His world under a schoolmaster; then it would have been preposterous to apply faith. There is a time when a larger spirit has come, and then it would be going back to use law.

I. The uses of restraint in the heart’s education.—

1. The first use of law is to restrain from open violence. It is necessary for those who feel the inclination to evil, and so long as the inclination remains so far must a man be under law. Imagine a governor amidst a population of convicts trusting to high principle. Imagine a parent having no fixed hours, no law in his household, no punishment for evil. There is a morbid feeling against punishment; but it is God’s method.

2. The second use of restraint is to show the inward force of evil.—A steam-engine at work in a manufactory is so quiet and gentle that a child might put it back. But interpose a bar of iron many inches thick, and it cuts through as if it were so much leather. Introduce a human limb—it whirls round, and the form of man is in one moment a bleeding, mangled, shapeless mass. It is restraint that manifests this unsuspected power. In the same way law discovers the strength of evil in our hearts.

3. The third use is to form habits of obedience.—In that profession which is Specially one of obedience—the military profession—you cannot mistake the imparted type of character. Immediate, prompt obedience, no questioning “why?” Hence comes their decision of character. Hence, too, their happiness. Would you have your child happy, decided, manly? Teach him to obey. It is an error to teach a child to act on reason, or to expect reasons why a command is given. Better it is that he should obey a mistaken order than be taught to see that it is mistaken. A parent must be master in his own house.

4. The fourth use is to form habits of faith.—As Judaism was a system calculated to nurture habits of obedience, so was it one which nourished the temper of faith. All education begins with faith. The child does not know the use of the alphabet, but he trusts. The boy beginning mathematics takes on trust what he sees no use in. The child has to take parental wisdom for granted. Happy the child that goes on believing that nothing is wiser, better, greater, than his father! Blessed spirit of confiding trust which is to be transferred to God.

II. The time when restraint may be laid aside.—

1. When self-command is obtained. Some of us surely there are who have got beyond childish meanness: we could not be mean; restraint is no longer needed; we are beyond the schoolmaster. Some of us there are who have no inclination to intemperance; childish excess in eating and drinking exists no longer. Some of us there are who no longer love indolence. We have advanced beyond it. The law may be taken away, for we are free from law. True Christian liberty is this—self-command, to have been brought to Christ, to do right and love right, without a law of compulsion to school into doing it.

2. When the state of justification by faith has been attained.—There are two states of justification—by the law and by faith. Justification by the law implies a scrupulous and accurate performance of minute acts of obedience in every particular; justification by faith is acceptance with God, not because a man is perfect, but because he does all in a trusting, large, generous spirit, actuated by a desire to please God. In Christianity there are few or no definite laws—all men are left to themselves.

3. Restraint must be laid aside when the time of faith has come, whether faith itself have come or not.—It is so in academical education. We may have attained the full intellectual comprehension of the gospel, but religious goodness has not kept pace with it, and the man wakes to conviction that the gospel is a name and the powers of the world to come are not in him. You cannot put him to school again. Fear will not produce goodness. Forms will not give reverence. System will not confer freedom. Therefore the work of childhood and youth must be done while we are young, when the education is not too late.—F. W. Robertson.

Galatians 3:24. The Law preparing for Christ.

I. The law led men to Christ by foreshadowing Him.—This was true of the ceremonial part of it. The ceremonies meant more than the general duty of offering to God praise and sacrifice, since this might have been secured by much simpler rites. What was the meaning of the solemn and touching observance of the Jewish day of atonement? We know that what passed in that old earthly sanctuary was from first to last a shadow of the majestic self-oblation of the true High Priest of Christendom, Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Each ceremony was felt to have some meaning beyond the time then present, and so it fostered an expectant habit of mind; and as the ages passed these expectations thus created converged more and more towards a coming Messiah, and in a subordinate but real way the ceremonial law did its part in leading the nation to the school of Christ.

II. By creating in man’s conscience a sense of want which Christ alone could relieve.—This was the work of the moral law, of every moral precept in the books of Moses, but especially of those most sacred and authoritative precepts which we know as the ten commandments. So far from furnishing man with a real righteousness, so far from making him such as he should be, correspondent to the true ideal of his nature, the law only inflicted on every conscience that was not fatally benumbed a depressing and overwhelming conviction that righteousness, at least in the way of legal obedience, was a thing impossible. And this conviction of itself prepared men for a righteousness which should be not the product of human efforts, but a gift from heaven—a righteousness to be attained by the adhesion of faith to the perfect moral Being, Jesus Christ, so that the believer’s life becomes incorporate with His.

III. By putting men under a discipline which trained them for Christ.—What is the divine plan for training, whether men or nations? Is it not this—to begin with rule and to end with principle, to begin with law and to end with faith, to begin with Moses and to end with Christ? God began with rule. He gave the Mosaic law, and the moral parts of that law being also laws of God’s own essential nature could not possibly be abrogated; but as rules of life the ten commandments were only a preparation for something beyond them. In the Christian revelation God says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” When you have done this, and He on His part has by His Spirit infused into you His divine life so that you are one with Him, you will not depend any longer mainly upon rules of conduct. Justification by faith is so far from being moral anarchy that it is the absorption of rule into the higher life of principle. In the experience of the soul faith corresponds to the empire of principle in the growth of individual character and in the development of national life, while the law answers to that elementary stage in which outward rules are not yet absorbed into principle.—H. P. Liddon.

The Law a Schoolmaster.

I. The Jewish religion brought men to Christ by the light, the constraining force, of prophecy.—First a human deliverance of some kind, then a personal Saviour, is announced. He was exactly what prophecy had foretold. He Himself appealed to prophecy as warranting His claims.

II. By that ceremonial law which formed so important a part of it.—The Jewish ceremonial pointed to Christ and His redemptive work from first to last. The epistle to the Hebrews was written to show this—that the ceremonial law was far from being a final and complete rule of life and worship, did but prefigure blessings that were to follow it, that it was a tutor to lead men to the school of Christ.

III. By creating a sense of moral need that Christ alone could satisfy.—The moral law—God’s essential, indestructible moral nature in its relation to human life, thrown for practical purposes into the form of commandments—is essentially, necessarily beyond criticism; but when given to sinful man it does, but without grace, discover a want which it cannot satisfy. It enhanced the acting sense of unpardoned sin before a holy God. It convinced man of his moral weakness, as well as of his guilt, of his inability without the strengthening grace of Christ ever to obey it.

Lessons.—

1. We see a test of all religious privileges or gifts: Do they or do they not lead souls to Christ?

2. Observe the religious use of all law—to teach man to know his weakness and to throw himself on a higher power for pardon and strength.

3. We see the exceeding preciousness of Christ’s gospel—the matchless value of that faith which lives in the heart of the Church of God.—H. P. Liddon.

The Progress of Revelation.

I. The law was our schoolmaster as giving precepts in which principles were involved but not expressly taught.

II. As teaching inadequate and not perfect duties—a part instead of the whole, which was to develop into the whole. Examples—the institution of the Temple worship; the observance of the Sabbath; the third commandment.

Lessons.—

1. Revelation is education.

2. Revelation is progressive.

3. The training of the character in God’s revelation has always preceded the illumination of the intellect.—F. W. Robertson.