Galatians 4:7

Paul has just told the Galatians, “ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus”, and “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:26–29). Now he shows what being an heir was like before Christ came. He is writing against teachers often called Judaizers, Jewish Christians who insisted that Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to be saved, and the whole of his argument in these chapters is that we are justified by faith in Christ (Galatians 2:16). He has already shown that God’s promise to Abraham, received by faith, came first (Galatians 3:6–9).

The heir, klēronómos, is one who receives an inheritance. The word is built from klēros, a lot, and means a sharer by lot, an inheritor, and so a possessor. The child, nḗpios, is an infant or a minor, someone who has yet to come of age and so lacks full legal power over his own affairs. The servant, doûlos, is a slave or bondservant, from a root meaning to bind. Paul puts the three words together because the heir’s position is a paradox. He is “lord of all”, the rightful owner of the whole estate, and yet in his daily life he is as much under the orders of others as the slaves of the house are, since the estate is run for him by other people.

The custom behind the picture was well known among Greeks and Romans, and Paul’s readers in the Roman province of Galatia would have understood it at once. A minor heir, even one named sole heir of a large estate, came into control of it only at an age fixed by law. In Roman law this is usually given as fourteen for boys and twelve for girls, with full legal independence (sui iuris) sometimes coming later, and twenty-five is also given as the age of full legal capacity. Until then the heir was placed under guardians, who saw to his upbringing and education, and stewards, who managed the property, and it was a time of strict discipline and limited freedom.

“Even so we” applies the picture to Paul and his readers. The “we” takes in both Jews under the law and Gentiles under their own religions, which suited the Galatian churches, where Jewish and Gentile converts worshipped together. A Jewish believer would recognise the law as a time of tutelage, and a Gentile would recognise his old life under pagan gods and superstition as a kind of servitude. Both needed to be redeemed, by different routes out of the same childhood.

“When we were children” uses nḗpios again. Strong’s traces the word to a particle of negation and epos, a word, so that it means one who is still unable to speak, an infant, and figuratively a simple-minded person or an immature believer. The time before Christ was humanity’s childhood, a time when the full plan of salvation had yet to be revealed and the heirs were still unready to receive their inheritance. “Were in bondage” is doulóō, to enslave or bring under bondage, from doûlos, the servant of verse 1. Paul means a spiritual captivity to outward rules, principles or powers that had the strength to hold people and were powerless to redeem them. Against it he sets the liberty “wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1).

The word for fulness, plḗrōma, comes from plēróō, to fill, and means what fills a thing or what is filled, a full measure or a completed period. “The fulness of the time” is the moment when the time God had set was complete and ripe, the “time appointed of the father” of verse 2. It is the end of the preparing that ran through the Old Testament and its prophecies, and Paul speaks elsewhere of God gathering all things in Christ “in the dispensation of the fulness of times” (Ephesians 1:10). Christ’s birth was the planned work of the God who rules history, and Paul also writes that Christ died for the ungodly at the time God chose (Romans 5:6).

God had prepared the world itself for that moment. The peace that Rome kept, the Greek language spoken widely, the Roman roads, and the synagogues of the Jews scattered through the empire were all in place for the gospel to travel once it was preached.

“Sent forth” is exapostéllō, from ek, out from, and apostéllō, to send, so to send away on a mission with authority. The Father sends his Son out from heaven, and that means the Son was already with the Father before he was born. Jesus is the eternal Son of God, greater than any prophet and uncreated, and he came at his Father’s sending and in willing obedience to it.

“Made” is gínomai, to become or to come into being. Twice in this verse it describes a real becoming in history. “Made of a woman” means that the Son was truly born of a human mother, Mary, and is truly man. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He shared our flesh and blood so that he could stand in our place and make atonement for us (Hebrews 2:14–17), and because he knows our weakness from the inside, without sin, he is a High Priest touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15). Paul tells the Philippians how the Son, being in the form of God, humbled himself to take this place (Philippians 2:6–8). In one short verse Paul names him God’s Son and a woman’s son, fully God and fully man, which is what the one Mediator between God and us must be.

“Made under the law” means that the sinless Son placed himself under the law God had given Israel, with all its legal and moral demands. He did it to fulfil the law (Matthew 5:17), to live the complete obedience it required, and then to bear its curse, being “made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). The Son, who is above all law, took on the limits of the heir’s minority so that the heirs could come of age.

“Redeem” is exagorázō, to buy up, to ransom, and figuratively to rescue from loss. It is a word from the marketplace, where a price is paid to buy someone out of bondage. The price Christ paid was his own life on the cross, and believers are “bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20).

Those he bought out were “under the law”, hypó again with nómos. That word means law in general, and specially the law of Moses, and it can also mean a principle. Here it is the law of Moses. To be under it was to be subject to its demand for perfect obedience and to its judgment on every failure. The law shows God’s standard, and it gives neither the power to keep it nor the forgiveness of sins, so those under it stood in debt to God and apart from him. Paul has said that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God (Galatians 3:11), and that we are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 3:23–24). This is the gospel Paul has been defending through all of Galatians 3.

“Because ye are sons” states a settled fact. Sonship is God’s gift, received by faith in Christ, and the Spirit is given to those who already have it. The word is huiós, son, used very widely in Greek for kinship near or remote, and here it means a son with the full standing and rights of a grown heir, set against the minor of verses 1 to 3.

The verb is exapostéllō, the same that verse 4 uses for the sending of the Son. God sent forth his Son, and God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son, and the Spirit is his gift, given from his own will. He is called “the Spirit of his Son” because he is the Spirit who dwelt in Jesus, and he brings us into Christ’s own relationship with the Father. Jesus promised to send the Comforter after he went away (John 14:16–17), and after his resurrection he breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22).

The Spirit comes “into your hearts”. The heart, kardía, is the innermost person, the seat of thought, feeling and will. Our adoption is a legal standing before God, and it is also a living presence within us that shapes who we are.

“Crying” is krázō, a strong, urgent cry from deep within. The Spirit himself cries, and he enables us to cry with him. Romans says the same from our side: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15). The Spirit’s presence is the seal of our sonship, so the Spirit of life in Christ who dwells in us (Romans 8:9–11) is also our assurance that we belong to God.

“Wherefore” is hṓste, so then, and verse 7 draws the conclusion of the whole passage. The believer has passed for good out of the place of the doûlos, bound by the law or the elements of the world, and is now a huiós, a son with full rights in God’s family. The minor of verse 1 has come of age.

“If a son, then an heir” uses the plain ei, “if”, to show that heirship follows from sonship as surely as one step follows another. The word for heir is klēronómos once more, the word Paul began with, and now it describes us. To be an heir of God is to share in God’s own inheritance: eternal life, glory, the promises of the covenant and every spiritual blessing that comes from him. Paul says that believers are “heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17), in a passage about all who are led by the Spirit of God being the sons of God (Romans 8:14–17). Peter blesses God, “which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, To an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:3–4). When Christ, who is our life, appears, we will appear with him in glory (Colossians 3:4).

These verses tell you who you are if you belong to Christ. You are a son of God, adopted by his choice, bought out of bondage by his Son, and given his Spirit, who cries “Abba, Father” in your heart. Your standing with God rests on what Christ has done, and it is as settled as the adoption of a son into a household. Christ has made you free (Galatians 5:1), and Paul’s whole concern in this letter is that the Galatians stay free and keep from going back under guardians they have outgrown.

That changes the way a believer prays. You come to God as a child to his father, with the confidence and affection of the Son himself, by the Spirit he has given you. It changes obedience too. You have died to the law through the body of Christ so that you might belong to him and bear fruit for God (Romans 7:4–6), and the obedience of a son springs from love and gratitude. And it gives you a future. Whatever you lack now, you are an heir of God, with an inheritance kept in heaven that will never fade, and it comes to you through Christ.