NOTES for Gal 4:9

It is not easy to answer how we live before conversion and after it. If we look carefully, how greatly do our words, deeds, thoughts, and whole way of life differ from what they once were? It would seem that the changes should be striking, radical, and immediately visible to everyone. And even if these changes do take place, how much care do we take never to return to our former selves? As God's children and heirs, can we return to idolatry? Can we regard God, who surpasses our understanding, as a petty god whom we can bend to our whims and needs? He has become our Father; He has admitted us into His presence. We can live in Him and with Him only if we remind ourselves every day what we have left behind and where we now live. We live in His house.

Paul compares the state of a person who follows the Torah with the position of a household slave who can be adopted and who in that case receives the same rights as the master's natural sons. Such a practice was known in Jewish society, where a household slave was effectively a junior member of the family and differed from a member of the household only in that, in a legal sense, in terms of his rights in the house, he never grew up, as it were, but remained for life the younger and therefore unequal member of the large family. A person who follows the Torah finds himself in the house of the heavenly Father in much the same position simply because the Torah cannot give him anything more.

The Torah defines a person's responsibility before God without giving him any rights, since a person can have no rights before God by definition. A person simply finds himself completely in God's power, whether he realizes this fact or not. The Torah allows a person to recognize the obvious and, in the long run, to receive freedom and the fullness of life. But not in the sense of merely recognizing one's responsibility; otherwise freedom would turn out to be only necessity recognized and accepted as inevitable.

A person's recognition of his responsibility is only the first necessary step that makes it possible to build conscious relationships with God as with his heavenly Father. In the process of such spiritual growth, the Torah gradually ceases to be a legal or moral code for a person and becomes an inner imperative, an inner Torah that determines his life no longer from outside but from within. But while sin has any power over a person at all, he cannot fully entrust himself to God as a child, in the normal case, trusts a father.

God Himself must take the decisive step toward the person in order to free him from the power of sin, and then the person will be able to become a living Torah. Then nothing will remain in his life except what determines his relationship with God, giving it form and quality, so that the Torah as something separate from the person himself ceases to exist, even as an inner imperative. This is precisely the step toward people that God takes in Christ, and therefore a return to the Torah as a moral code or as a system of religious prescriptions is, for a Christian, an unconditional step backward, from sonship to slavery, about which the apostle warns the recipients of his letter.