NOTES for Gal 4:22-23
Paul interprets allegorically the story of the birth of Abraham's two sons, one by the concubine and the other by Abraham's wife Sarah. The allegory is that one of the two, born of the concubine, symbolizes a union-covenant with God 'according to the flesh,' promising nothing but slavery, while the second symbolizes the union of freedom, the covenant of the spirit. The Torah, describing the birth of both sons, contains both covenants within itself, but the fullness of relationships with God is possible only in the spirit, in freedom, and therefore in the Kingdom, symbolized by heavenly Jerusalem as, in the apostle's interpretation, the antithesis of earthly Jerusalem, and in Christ, who brought this Kingdom into the world. Here the Torah ceases to be only history or only a collection of prescriptions, legal, moral, or religious.
It becomes a description of the spiritual path, the path leading to liberation from the power of nature, and therefore from the world lying in evil. Indeed, evil, first of all, at least when speaking of the human being and human history, consists in the fact that in the stream of human life which in biblical language is called the soul, the natural component has prevailed over the spiritual, fully or chiefly determining the life of fallen humanity. No human efforts by themselves can change anything radically here. The Torah as a collection of legal or moral prescriptions is powerless here: the moral person remains under the power of sin; he is only sometimes able partially to hide his sinfulness so that it does not draw attention, just as law can sometimes hinder the most outrageous manifestations of the same sinfulness in public life.
The religious component of the Torah also cannot help: religion by itself does not change a person; by nature a religious person remains as he was born, he only tries to arrange his life so as to live in harmony with God, or more broadly, with higher powers. Meanwhile, harmony with God is possible only in His Kingdom, and here what is required is the transformation of the person himself, his liberation from the power of sin and from the dominance of the natural component in the stream of his life.
Here the inner Torah is needed as the spiritual imperative that can give a person a certain inner dynamic directed toward changing the quality of his life, the very process of his existence. Yet these changes have meaning only when they reach the end, the complete transfiguration of the person, the change of his very nature; and such a change is possible only with the direct participation of the Savior Himself, who brought into the world the fullness of the Kingdom and showed the world the only example of the living Torah. From the fullness of Christ, from the fullness of the Kingdom, there was hardly any sense in returning to religion or to morality; that would not simply be a step backward, but a real rollback, a return from the Kingdom under the power of this world.