Galatians 4 and the Lunch Question About Adoption

In March a man on my team named Neil asked me over lunch what Paul thinks he's adopting anybody into. Neil is Catholic and has read more of the Bible than I have, so I took it seriously. His reasoning was that we teach everyone is already a child of God, and yet Paul talks about adoption as if it's something that happens to you later, at some point after you've been a servant.

I mumbled something about there being two kinds of sonship, and Neil nodded the way you nod when you've decided not to push, and we went back to our sandwiches. I've owed him a better answer since. Galatians 4 was on the counter at the cabin this morning before anyone else was up, and I have more to say than I did over the sandwiches.

What is Paul adopting them into?

Start with verse 1, which is easy to skim past: "Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all."

The child in that sentence is already the heir, so nobody has to adopt him into anything. What he lacks is standing, and he'll have it at "the time appointed of the father" (verse 2). Until then he lives under tutors and governors, and from the outside you couldn't tell him from the hired help. Caleb is eleven and has noticed that the chore chart on our fridge treats the heir exactly like a servant. Verse 1 is the only place I know of that takes his side.

Paul then says that "when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son" so "that we might receive the adoption of sons" (4:4-5). The Galatians were mostly people who, in Paul's words, "knew not God" and served "them which by nature are no gods" (4:8). So for them adoption is partly a plain fact about where they started. But the word is doing more than that, and I think the heir in verse 1 shows what. So the adoption here has less to do with where you came from than with being counted, formally, as the one who inherits.

And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

Galatians 4:6-7

Being a child of God in the sense we usually mean on Sunday is one thing, and being counted in the covenant with Christ's name on you is another. Mosiah 5:7 puts it in nearly Paul's terms: "because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters." The Bible Dictionary says there are "two types of adoption spoken of in the scriptures." The first is a person of non-Israelite lineage joining the house of Israel through faith, and the second is that all candidates for the fulness of salvation are "accounted as sons and daughters of Jesus Christ." That second one is the answer I'd give Neil. He may well put it differently, and I'd like to hear how.

Why does Paul start pleading in the middle?

I used to hurry through verses 12 to 20 to get back to the argument. This time they were the part that caught on me.

"Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am, for I am as ye are." He has argued with them for three chapters, and now he asks them to hear him as one of them. A few verses later he says "Where is then the blessedness ye spake of?" and reminds them they would have plucked out their own eyes for him (4:15). Then, plainly hurt: "Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?"

In the first chapter, if you remember the letter with no thank-you in it, he came in hard and stayed hard. Here he describes himself as a mother in labor a second time, "until Christ be formed in you" (4:19), and in the next verse he says he wishes he could be standing in the room so he could "change my voice." He can't tell how the letter sounds to them, and he says he stands "in doubt" of them in the same letter where he's rebuking them.

I've sent a few messages at work that I'd have paid to deliver out loud instead.

He also mentions, almost in passing, that he first preached to them "through infirmity of the flesh" (4:13) and that they didn't despise it. He doesn't say what the infirmity was.

The days, the months and the years

Verse 10 reads, "Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years," and I don't know which days Paul means. I keep a reading plan, a calendar and a Sunday routine, and I'd be surprised if he meant to condemn any of that, since verse 9 is aimed at going back to "the weak and beggarly elements" and wanting "again to be in bondage." The word that stops me is "again." In Mosiah 24 a people in actual bondage prayed their way out. Here are people who'd been let out and were drifting back toward the old arrangement on their own, which looks stranger on the page.

Hagar and Sarah, and an allegory Paul admits to

Verse 21 is a challenge: "Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?" He's about to use the law's own book on them. Abraham had two sons, one by a bondmaid and one by a freewoman, and the one by the bondwoman "was born after the flesh" while the other "was by promise" (4:22-23).

Then Paul says something I appreciate, which is "Which things are an allegory." He tells us what he's doing and doesn't claim Genesis meant this when Moses wrote it down, only that the story can be read as two covenants, one "from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage," and a Jerusalem above that "is free, which is the mother of us all" (4:24-26). Then he quotes Isaiah about the desolate woman having more children than the one with a husband (4:27) and lands on verse 28: "Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise."

I slow down at verse 30, "Cast out the bondwoman and her son." It's Sarah's line from Genesis 21:10, and I wouldn't enjoy reading it aloud to someone. I went back to Genesis 21 after reading it, and Genesis won't let Hagar stay a symbol. Abraham puts bread and a bottle of water on her shoulder and sends her out, and when the water's gone she sits "a good way off" because she can't watch. Then "God heard the voice of the lad," an angel calls her by name, and God opens her eyes to a well (21:14-19). The very next verse says "God was with the lad" (21:20). Paul isn't saying anything about her or her descendants. He's using two mothers to talk about two covenants.

One more oddity, and I can't resolve it. Paul says Ishmael "persecuted" Isaac (4:29). Genesis 21:9 says only that Sarah saw him "mocking," so Paul's word is the heavier one. An allegory probably gets some room.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does "sons" leave out women?

Not as I read it. Paul said one chapter earlier that in Christ "there is neither male nor female" (Galatians 3:28), and Mosiah 5:7 says "sons and daughters" outright. "Son" was simply the word for the person who inherits, and that's the idea he needs.

Is Paul calling the law bad?

Not the way I read him. In verse 21 he goes to the law to make his argument, and people don't usually cite a book they despise. The tutors and governors of verse 2 are a stage a child passes through.

Does keeping covenants count as the bondage Paul is warning about?

No, and Mosiah 5:8 puts freedom and obedience in the same verse: "under this head ye are made free," and then it hopes you'll "be obedient unto the end of your lives." What Paul is after is the idea that the rule-keeping is what makes you an heir.

What does "Abba" mean?

It's Aramaic for father. People like to say it means "Daddy," which some scholars think is overstated. What I like about Galatians 4:6 is that the Spirit is the one doing the crying, so nobody has to work up the courage to say it first.

If you grew up in the Church, was there a time when you stopped feeling like you had to earn your seat? What did it, and how old were you?

— D.