The tutor has gone. We have reached maturity. There is no longer a law prison in which we reside. We are no longer kept. Lock and key no longer prevent us from being free. The faith has come and that which would set us free…faith and the promise…has now come.
It is Brooks Hatlen walking out the front gates of Shawshank Prison into fresh air. the keeps us like Andy DuFresne trying to crawl through that tube of muck…and all the other things you can image. But with the law, Andy never gets free…he keeps just crawling and crawling and crawling.
With this newfound freedom comes a new identity. That of a slave is gone forever and we are now sons of God…a title never available through the law but always available through faith.
Paul concludes the story of Galatians 3 with these last four verses..”.26 For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.“
The ‘you’ is the Galatians that he is writing to…by their faith (before the false teaching Judaizers came along) they already had this new identity and now they were willing to throw it all away.
You only become a son of God through faith in Christ, not by following the law. Trying to be righteous before God by your own efforts does not grant the status of sonship. Paul tells the Galatians that they no longer are children needing a tutor but instead emancipated sons…and the idea of a son here is of one who is a full and complete age.
There are four fundamental changes that occur inn someone when they trade law for faith, slavery for sonship.
Here is the first result of that freedom: we become sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. No longer are we children in need of the guidance and discipline of a custodian; we are sons and daughters of God. The emphasis here is on adult sonship. A son or daughter who reaches maturity enters into a free relationship with his or her parents. The relationship is not defined by rules and regulations, control and manipulation, or approval based on performance. That is law. Sonship is a relationship of respect, mutual acceptance, trust and freedom. In a healthy family, both parents and children desire and work toward this kind of relationship. Paul is saying that as Christians we are sons of God, and we have this kind of free relationship with our Father.
The second thing that occurred in order to bring about our sonship is that we were clothed with Christ. Paul says, “all of you who were baptized into Christ
have clothed yourselves with Christ.” This is a reference to the toga ‘virilis’, the robe that was given by a father to his son during the sonship ceremony, part of the Roman culture, as a sign that he had entered manhood, into adult sonship. We find the same symbol in the story of the prodigal son. When the wayward son returned home, the father dressed him in his best robe, his own garment. In the same way, sonship is granted to the Christian and he is clothed with the garments of Christ. When we are united in baptism with Christ, the Son of
God, then we have clothed ourselves with him and we become as he is to his Father.
Not only do we become sons of God, we become one in Christ. Not only do we gain a new identity, we gain a new family. Paul says that this is a radically new family: it has no racial, sexual, or social distinctions. In the cross, Jesus demolished the dividing wall, the barrier that stood between Jew and Greek. He abolished the law and created a whole new humanity, a new society, one new man. Here we have a redefinition of everything the Israelite
held dear. Not only does one lose one’s identification with Judaism, if a Jew, one also loses one’s identification with humanity as we have known it, for the Chris
tian has been placed in a new environment. And that environment was Christ himself, the ultimate Adam
Finally, Paul says the fourth result of our freedom is that we are seeds of Abraham and heirs according to promise. “…in Christ we belong to God and to each other. In Christ we also belong to Abraham” (John Stott). Again we are taken back to the promise to Abraham that he would have a seed who would be an
heir, not Ishmael, but “one who shall come forth from your own body, he shall be your heir” (Gen. 15:4). The seed was Christ, and Christ was the heir to the kingdom of his Father. When we are baptized into Christ we not
only become the seed of Abraham, we not only become sons, we not only have equal relationships, we not only become part of a whole new family, but we become heirs to the kingdom.
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