Galatians 5: The Part of Paul's List I Never Counted

For most of my adult life I read the works of the flesh the way you read the damage section on a rental car form. Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness. I'd run my eye down the list, find that most of it described somebody else's bad year, and move along to the fruit of the Spirit, where I could locate myself fairly comfortably. Love and joy and peace, and somewhere in the middle of them, me, on a good day.

I got that wrong, and not in a subtle way. I'm at the cabin table this Monday morning with the chapter open, the lake not yet visible through the window because of the haze, and I finally did what I should have done twenty years ago, which was count.

What's actually in the middle of the list?

Paul gives seventeen works of the flesh in verses 19 to 21. Count them and sort them and the list is lopsided. The first four are the ones I'd always pictured, and they are about the body. The last three, murders and drunkenness and revellings, are the loud ones that end up in a police report. Everything in between is something else.

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,

— Galatians 5:20

After idolatry and witchcraft verse 20 turns and stays turned for the next eight items. Hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, and then envyings at the start of verse 21. I'd call those eight the ones that happen in a group of people. Nobody commits strife alone in a garage. I think "emulations" in 1611 English meant jealous rivalry and not copying somebody, though I'd check that before I put it on a plaque, and "heresies" here sits so squarely among the quarrels that I read it as factions, people splitting into camps, not a doctrinal exam. That's my reading and I hold it loosely.

So of seventeen things on the list, eight are about how people treat each other when they disagree or compete, and I'd been skimming right past them for the better part of two decades. They don't sound dangerous. Nobody I know has been called in over envy. I've sat in plenty of meetings, at church and at work, where I could have scored well on the middle of that list before the closing prayer ever came around.

The chapter has bookends for the same idea if you look. Verse 15 says "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another." And the last verse of the chapter, verse 26, says "Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another." Envying turns up in both the list and the closing line, which I don't think is an accident of drafting. The phrase "one another" turns up four times in the second half of the chapter, once in verse 13 and once in 15 and twice in 26, and only the first of them is good news.

I didn't expect a chapter about the circumcision fight to be mostly about the people having the fight.

Why does Paul say "serve one another" right before "bite and devour"?

Verse 13 reads "For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another." Verse 14 says the whole law is fulfilled in one word, and the word turns out to be a sentence about loving your neighbor as yourself. Then verse 15 goes straight to teeth.

I'd always read verses 13 and 14 as the nice part and verse 15 as an odd little intrusion. I now think they're one thought. Paul has spent four verses at the top of the chapter telling the Galatians that adding the law of Moses on top of Christ makes Christ of no effect to them (verse 4 is blunt about it). The obvious worry is that if you take the rule-keeping away people will drift into doing whatever they please. His answer isn't mainly "don't sin" in the sense of that first group of four. It's that unspent liberty rots, and the first thing it rots into is a church where people are eating each other over who's right. That's inference, because he doesn't say what was happening in Galatia in so many words. But "bite and devour" is a specific charge, and he wouldn't have written it to a calm congregation.

The citation in verse 14 goes back to Leviticus 19:18, and if you read the whole verse there it begins with not avenging and not bearing a grudge before it gets to loving your neighbor. So the neighbor commandment was never the soft one. It started in grudges.

Which brings me to verse 12, and I'll just say I don't know what to do with it. "I would they were even cut off which trouble you." It can be read as wishing the teachers removed from the church, or as something a good deal rougher, and Paul writes it two verses before telling the Galatians not to bite. I notice that Paul can do what he asks them not to. I wrote about how sharp he sounds in Galatians 1 and the letter with no thank-you in it, and it's still there in chapter 5. I'm not going to smooth it over.

Can you really walk in the Spirit and not do the things you would?

Verse 16 says "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh." Verse 17 is the one that used to sink me: "so that ye cannot do the things that ye would."

It's easy to read that as a verdict. Flesh and Spirit pulling opposite directions and me in the middle unable to do what I wanted, which is how I felt on a lot of Sundays. It sounded like a sentence handed down.

Read with verse 18 right behind it, it sounds more like a description of why a rulebook can't carry the load. "But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." Paul is talking to people who were told they were debtors to the whole law (verse 3), and he's saying the law can't settle a tug of war between two things inside you, because the rules are on one side only. That's a weaker point than I'd like, and a smarter reader of Greek would say it better. But it fits what he says next.

And "walk" is an ordinary verb. Nobody gets to the other side of the valley by deciding to once, with feeling.

If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.

— Galatians 5:25

I used to hear that as two commands. It reads to me now as one.

Is it nine fruits or one?

Verses 22 and 23 are the other list. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law."

The word is "fruit" and the verb is "is." Not "fruits," not "are." I've heard it taught both ways in Sunday School, and some people read love as the fruit and the other eight as how it shows up on different days. That reading helps me. I just want to flag that the text itself doesn't say so, it lists nine and calls them one fruit, so the rest is somebody's tidy thinking, mine included.

What I'd put next to it is Moroni 7:45, which gives a list for charity. "Charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked." Set that beside verses 20 and 21 and the two lists answer each other almost line for line. Longsuffering answers wrath and "envieth not" answers envyings. "Is not easily provoked" answers strife about as directly as you could ask. I didn't plan that match when I started this post, I just had Moroni open for another reason, and it surprised me how much of Paul's middle eight Mormon had a direct reply for.

Verse 24 is the part I'd skip if I were building a nicer post. "And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts." Crucified is past tense and a strong word. I read it as something already begun, not something I can pull off before lunch, but I won't pretend I know how that gets accomplished in a person. I know the middle eight don't go quietly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean to walk in the Spirit day to day?

I'd say it looks smaller than people expect. A reply you hold for an hour before sending, a decision made without waiting to see who notices. Paul's own examples in this chapter are about how you treat other people, so I'd start by looking at those moments before I looked for anything dramatic.

Does liberty in Christ mean the commandments don't apply?

No, and verse 13 is Paul saying so himself. Liberty is for serving "by love," and the whole second half of the chapter, with seventeen works of the flesh that "shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (verse 21), is a long way from permission.

How would I know whether the fruit is growing?

I'd ask somebody close to me and then not argue with the answer. Paul told the Corinthians to test themselves, and I wrote about that in 2 Corinthians 13, examine yourselves whether ye be in the faith. My own read on my own patience has never been a reliable instrument.

Why does Paul spend so long on circumcision if we aren't dealing with it?

Because the question under it is whether you add something to what Christ already did and then call people who skip the addition lesser. Verse 6 says "faith which worketh by love" is what counts. We have our own versions of the addition, and they're easier to spot in other people.

This week I'm going to read verses 15 and 26 each morning before breakfast and see which of the eight words shows up in my own day first. There's also a text from my brother Jonathan from Friday that I answered shorter than I meant to, and I'd like to fix that one today.

— D.