Galatians 2:21 - Exposition

I do not frustrate the grace of God ( οὐκ ἀθετῶ τὴν χάριν τοῦ θεοῦ ); I do not reject the grace of God. As I should be doing, it; instead of resting with "glorified" ( 1 Peter 1:8 ) satisfaction in the fatherly love and complacency with which God regards me in Christ, I began to give anxious heed to what the Law prescribes touching things or persons clean or unclean, and to deem it possible and needful to secure acceptableness with God through works of ceremonial performance. If it were only for one single reason alone, I do not, I cannot, thus slight and set at nought the state of grace with all its attendant blessings into which God has in Christ Jesus brought me. The "grace of God" presents that entire notion of the kingdom of grace which the apostle sets forth, and on which he descants with such glowing animation, in the fifth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. The term of itself stands in vivid contrast to that slavish, anxious, never assured working for acceptance, which characterized the Jewish legalist, and characterizes the legalist Christian as well. As the apostle does not write ἐγὼ οὐκ ἀθετῶ , which would mean, "I do not set aside, not I," he is not to be read as if just now emphasizing a personal contrast between himself, and either St. Peter or the Judaizers with whom St. Peter was then to outward appearance taking sides; he is at present simply winding up his recital of his remonstrance at Antioch with the one terse argument, with which he then justified his own position, and, as if with a sledge-hammer, at once demolished the position of the Judaizers. The verb ἀθετῶ means "reject," "turn from as from a thing unworthy of regard;" as in Mark 7:9 , "Ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your tradition;" Luke 7:30 , "The Pharisees and lawyers rejected for themselves the counsel of God;" 1 Thessalonians 4:8 , "He that rejecteth [our testimony touching this], rejeeteth not man, but God;" Hebrews 10:28 , "A man that hath set at nought Moses' Law;" in which last passage it indicates, but without itself fully describing, a more aggressive disobedience. The rendering "made void," adopted by the Revisers, in the sense of "disannul," is doubtless fully authenticated by Galatians 3:15 ; 1 Timothy 5:12 ; Hebrews 9:18 . Since even an apostle could not "disannul" the "grace of God" viewed in itself, this sense of the word, if adopted, would, as well as the perhaps questionable rendering of our Authorized Version, "frustrate," apply to the previous work of Divine grace wrought upon the apostle's own soul. But the logical connection of the following clause is more easily shown by our reverting to the sense before given to the verb, which in the New Testament is the more usual one. For if righteousness come by the Law, then Christ is dead in vain ( εἰ γὰρ διὰ νόμου δικαιοσύνη ἄρα χριστὸς δωρεὰν ἀπέθανεν ); for if through the Law is righteousness , then did Christ for nought die. This one reason is decisive. The sole reason why the Son of God came into the world to suffer death was to do away our sins and make us righteous with God. But if sin can be purged by the purifications of the Law, and cleanness before God is procurable by Levitical ceremonies, then there was no need for this; then the Crucifixion, for this one end ordained and from the beginning of time prepared for by the Father, and fur this one end, of his own free choice gone forward to, brought about, and undergone by Christ himself, was a simply superfluous sacrifice. We might have been saved, nay, have perchance saved ourselves, without it. It is impossible to find in all Scripture a more decisive passage than this in proof both of the fact of, the atonement and of its supreme importance in the Christian system. This is emphatically Christ's great work. Compared with this, all besides is either subsidiary or derivative, δωρεάν , (as a mere gift,) "for nought;" that is, without cause, there being no call or just occasion for it; thus, John 15:25 , "They hated me without cause ;" 1 Samuel 19:5 , Septuagint, "Slay David without a cause ;" Ezekiel 6:10 , Septuagint, "I have not said in vain that I would do this evil unto them;" Ecclus. 29:6, "He hath got him an enemy without cause. " The apostle adds nothing as to the effect of his remonstrance. It is impossible, however, to doubt that, so instinct as it was with the power of the Holy Spirit, it proved successful, not only in the healing of the mischief which had begun to show itself in the Antiochian Church, but also in its effect upon St. Peter. Nothing has transpired of any later intercourse between the two apostles. But the thorough honesty which in the main was one of St. Peter's great characteristics, notwithstanding the perplexed action in which from time to time he got involved, through the warmth of his sympathetic affections and his sometimes too hasty impulsiveness, would be sure to make him pre-eminently tractable to the voice of a true-speaking and holy friend; and, moreover, in the present instance, St. Paul was appealing to sentiments which he had himself recently proved at Jerusalem to be deeply operative in his own bosom. How deeply operative, is further evinced in his own two Epistles, written some eight or ten years later than this Epistle, and addressed also in part to the same Galatian Churches; in which he not only weaves into his language not a few expressions and turns of thought which have all the appearance of being borrowed from Epistles of St. Paul, but also in the second of them makes direct mention of those Epistles, speaking of them as standing on the footing of "the other Scriptures," and of their author as "our beloved brother Paul;" notwithstanding that one of those very writings contains the extremely plain-spoken account of that sad fall of his at Antioch. which we have here been considering. (On St. Paul's later relations with St. Barnabas, see above on verse 13.)

ADDITIONAL NOTE.