Galatians by R. Alan Cole

Author:R. Alan Cole [Cole, R. Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830894871
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2015-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

c. Who is under the curse? (3:10–14)

Paul must now swing around at once to meet a flank attack, real or expected. The Judaizers will have been fuming with impatience all this time. Why talk about Abraham, they will say, when the real question is the law? Abraham stood at the very beginning of God’s revelatory process. Centuries later, God crowned the whole process by giving the law of Moses. It is by keeping this law that Israel looks for salvation. If God in his mercy used some other system in the days of Abraham, that was because there was as yet no law to keep. True, some rabbis wasted much ingenuity in trying to prove that the patriarchs, particularly Abraham, had in fact kept the law, though it had not yet been revealed (Kidd. 4:14). But that was necessary only to maintain the respectability of Abraham, not to uphold the cohesiveness of their own self-contained system. What the Judaizers were preaching to the Galatians was the utter necessity of keeping the law of Moses (in part at least) as essential for salvation. To them therefore all this talk about Abraham was quite irrelevant to the issue (unless they seriously believed that he had indeed kept the whole law) while to Paul, as we have seen, it was fundamental.

The common opinion of the Jewish scholar of Paul’s day was that the vulgar ‘am hă-’āreş, ‘the people of the land’, the common folk who had neither knowledge of, nor interest in, the law, were already under God’s curse: see John 7:49, which could be paralleled by much stronger language outside the Bible. Now Paul turns the tables on them; it is the Jewish scholar, not the Gentile sinner, who is clearly under the curse. The details of the meaning of this curse will be given below. At the moment, the sole question is the curse’s location, and Paul is clear on that question. Verses 10 and 11 may be paraphrased as follows:

‘All of those who hunt for acceptance with God on the grounds of doing what the law commands are under the curse of God. That is clear from Scripture which says, “Everyone who fails to stand fast by everything written in the lawbook, and to do it, is under the curse of God.” It is perfectly clear that no-one obtains right standing with God by law, for Scripture says, “The one who obtains right standing through faith will win life.” ’

10. Only a loose paraphrase such as the above can hope to bring out the meaning here. Paul is deliberately contrasting hoi ek pisteōs, ‘men of faith’, with hosoi ex ergōn nomou, all who rely on works of the law. In general terms, of course, the first correspond to the Christian and the second to the Jew. But for Paul, the categories are more inclusive still, for they correspond to the only two ways in which it is possible to approach God. Either we approach God completely without merit of our own, on the ground of his grace alone, or we approach him on the grounds of our own merits.

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