Galatians 5:1

Paul’s mainly Gentile readers were in danger of returning to slavery, not to the slavery of their heathen sins as before but to the slavery of the Mosaic Law. The false teachers were evidently telling them that they needed to submit to circumcision to be truly acceptable to God.

"Before plunging into this third section of his letter, Paul interjects a verse that is at once a summary of all that has gone before and a transition to what follows. It is, in fact, the key verse of the entire Epistle. Because of the nature of the true gospel and of the work of Christ on his behalf, the believer is now to turn away from anything that smacks of legalism and instead rest in Christ’s triumphant work for him and live in the power of Christ’s Spirit. . . . The appeal is for an obstinate perseverance in freedom as the only proper response to an attempt to bring Christians once more under legalism." [Note: Boice, p. 486.]

In the quotation above, Boice used the term "legalism" as it is commonly used to describe both legalism and nomism.

In what sense has God liberated Christians from the "yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1) that is the Mosaic Law (cf. Romans 10:4; 2 Corinthians 3:7-11; Hebrews 7:12; Galatians 3:24)?

Calvin and many reformed theologians have answered this question this way. They have said the ceremonial laws (e.g., animal sacrifices, dietary restrictions, feast days, etc.) are no longer binding on Christians because of the death of Christ. Nevertheless the moral laws (the Ten Commandments) are still binding. God has done away with the moral laws only in the sense that they no longer condemn us (Romans 8:11). [Note: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:2:11:4.] The problem with this explanation is that it makes a distinction between two parts of the Law that the text does not make. The text simply states that Christ is the end of "the Law" (Romans 10:4), not the ceremonial part of the Law. Furthermore if the Ten Commandments are all still binding on us, why have Christians throughout history (Acts 20:7; cf. 1 Corinthians 16:2) met to worship on Sunday rather than on the Sabbath? Some reformed theologians, following Calvin, believe that God abolished Sabbath worship along with the ceremonial laws. [Note: Ibid., 1:2:8:33, 34.] This seems somewhat inconsistent. Others, following the Westminster Confession, regard Sunday worship as a continuation of Sabbath worship. [Note: The Confession of Faith; the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, with the Scripture Proofs at Large, 21:7.] Nevertheless it is, of course, very different.

Dispensational theologians have suggested another answer to this question that to me seems more consistent with what Scripture says. They say that God did away with the Mosaic Law completely, both the ceremonial and the moral parts. He terminated it as a code and has replaced it with a new code, "the Law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). Some commandments in the Law of Christ are the same as those in the Law of Moses (e.g., nine of the Ten Commandments, excluding the command to observe the Sabbath day). God-given codes of laws that governed people’s behavior existed before God gave the Law of Moses (e.g., Genesis 1:28-30; Genesis 2:16-17; Genesis 3:14-19; Genesis 9:1-17). God incorporated some specific commands from these former codes into the Law of Christ even though they were not part of the Law of Moses (e.g., 1 Timothy 4:3; cf. Genesis 9:3). He also incorporated nine of the Ten Commandments from the Mosaic Code.

"May this procedure not be likened to the various codes in a household with growing children? At different stages of maturity new codes are instituted, but some of the same commandments appear often. To say that the former code is done away and all its commandments is no contradiction. It is as natural as growing up. So it is with the Mosaic Law and the law of Christ." [Note: Charles C. Ryrie, "The End of the Law," Bibliotheca Sacra 124:495 (July-September 1967):247.]

"The ’yoke’ was used in current Jewish parlance in an honorable sense for the obligation to keep the law of Moses, and the Judaizers may well have urged the Galatians to ’take the yoke of the law’ upon themselves. But Paul bluntly points out that the ordinances of the law as demanded by the Judaizers constitute a slave’s yoke, so that he uses the word in the bad sense of an imposed burden, like slavery (cf. Acts 15:10; 1 Timothy 6:1)." [Note: Fung, pp. 216-17.]