Main news for 28 December 2025

King James Version (en)

Galatians, Chapter 5, verse 7

⁷Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth?

NOTES

What is freedom, and does it exist in this world? In today’s passage from the Epistle to the Galatians, the apostle Paul emphasizes...

In his letters Paul often compares Christian life to a race, and Christians to runners in a stadium competing with one another. Here too the apostle compares the recipients of his letter to runners who began their race well, but then something stopped them so that they no longer hear the voice of truth. From the immediate context it becomes clear that he is speaking of an infatuation with that very religiosity which has never been enough for a genuinely righteous life.

Circumcision becomes the symbol of this religiosity, and with it, apparently, some members of the Galatian church connected their spiritual life even more than with Christ. And here their spiritual path ends. It ends precisely as a path on which they were supposed to walk or run, and which was supposed to pass in direct communion and union with Christ. The Christian's path is the path of the Kingdom, not the path of religion. But that is not the only point.

Paul does not accidentally tell the recipients of his letter that they have stopped. They did not turn onto another path, did not turn back, but precisely stopped. And no wonder: religiosity can both help a person on the spiritual path and hinder him. Religious life as such has no direct relation to spiritual life, although it is connected with it. It is connected above all as form is connected with content. Or, more precisely, as a source of forms for the content with which spiritual life is filled in that part of it which is connected with communion with God.

Here religion can indeed prove useful. But not when it turns into an end in itself. Not when religious life replaces spiritual life, that dynamic of relationships binding a person to God and to other people, which no religion can replace. Here one can truly speak only of a stop on the spiritual path. And if the stop lasts long enough, perhaps even of a rejection of that path: after all, a person can be satisfied with religion alone if he makes the corresponding choice. But then one will have to speak only and precisely of religion, and not of Christianity.

Speaking about circumcision, Paul compares it with slavery, urging his readers to remain free people...

Speaking about circumcision, Paul compares it with slavery, urging his readers to remain free people (v. 1). He tells the Galatian Christians directly that if they are circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to them (v. 2). At first glance, such a statement contradicts the apostle's own words, spoken, however, at another time and on another occasion, that circumcision prevents neither salvation nor abiding in the Kingdom. The key to understanding such a stern statement by Paul is the apostle's demand that the one being circumcised fulfill the whole Torah completely (v. 3). Paul, as can be seen, is not against circumcision. He is not against religion as such, as long as it does not hinder entrance into the Kingdom, and he is certainly not against the Torah. But he is firmly against the game of religion into which, as can be seen, the Christians of Galatia had been drawn. He reminds the Galatians that in Christ the question of circumcision loses all meaning, that it has no relation at all to the Kingdom (v. 6). One cannot be justified by the Torah, and the Galatian Christians ought to know this (vv. 4-5).

But that is not the only point. The point is that they do not treat circumcision at all as the Torah prescribes. For a believing Jew who observes the Torah, the question of circumcision sometimes became a matter of life and death, as it did, for example, during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, when circumcision was performed secretly and was punishable by death. In such a situation circumcision became the consequence of a deep spiritual choice, and not everyone resolved to take it. But in the present case the situation was different: circumcision was being used precisely in order to avoid problems, problems that Paul himself clearly did not try to avoid in this way (v. 11). For the apostle, as can be seen, circumcision is too serious a thing to be used as a cover. And he calls the Christians of Galatia to treat it just as seriously. He reminds them that by agreeing to circumcision they are choosing another path, not the one to which Paul had testified to them and on which they had walked before (vv. 7-8). This is no trifle; betrayal begins with something small (v. 9). And if someone among those who preach circumcision in the Galatian church does not understand the full seriousness of the situation, so much the worse for him (v. 10).

Circumcision, like religion in general, is neither good nor bad in itself. Everything depends on what it is for a person: a choice of path or a game that is played partly in order to avoid unpleasantness. In the first case, it is possible that the chosen path will still lead a person to the threshold of the Kingdom, as happened with Paul himself. After all, before the meeting on the Damascus road, he himself did not dare to think that circumcision could be spiritually useless. The second path leads nowhere, because it goes nowhere. It most of all resembles a circle around a playground, around which one can run endlessly. And the apostle certainly does not want running in circles to become the main occupation of his Galatian brothers.

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