Galatians 4:21

8. Superiority of faith over legalism illustrated by the history of Sarah and Hagar, Galatians 4:21 to Galatians 5:1.

21. Tell me As if after an interval since writing the last tenderer paragraph, St. Paul resumes the more severe and imperative strain of Galatians 2:1-7.

Desire… under the law The observers of seasons, as in Galatians 4:10.

Hear the law The Jews did hear the law read to them in the synagogue every sabbath; but Paul demands now whether they will hear it with the earnest ear of the soul. He is going to frame for these legalists an argument after the style and manner of their own legal teachers.

The ensuing allegorical exposition of the Abrahamic history was shaped after a form of composition current in the Jewish schools. The passage has been much attacked by adverse criticism, and even evangelical expositors. It is asked, Was this Old Testament narrative allegory, and not true history? Or, if true history, can we suppose that this combination of events and characters was divinely framed to evolve this lesson deduced by St. Paul?

All these difficulties would have vanished, we think, in a moment if our commentators had noted what none of them seems to have done that Paul has merely here put into an allegorical form the very same thought as in logical form he gives in Romans 9:6-10, (where see our notes.) The thought simply is this: That Christianity does, by its very nature, disclose an underlying subsense in the Old Testament; not only in its ritual, but in its history. And an allegory is simply an external surface history under which there lies an internal subsense.