Galatians 3:16–17

In Galatians 3:16 the apostle is speaking of Genesis 12 and 22, only here he means one special seed. God made the promise to Abraham alone, and confirmed it to his seed in chapter 22. The promises of a very numerous seed are separate. Also, Abraham is not joined with his seed in this promise. It should be read, "To Abraham were the promises made, and to his seed."

To an eye without God's light, the meaning the apostle gives these words here seems forced and arbitrary. That is true of many other sayings of the Spirit. For "seed" is a collective noun, and Scripture keeps using it in the singular to mean a multitude.

He is speaking not of the merely Jewish promises, but of the ones that secured blessing for the Gentiles. These were made to Abram in Genesis 12, and to his seed in Genesis 22, after Abraham had offered Isaac up in figure and received him back from the dead in figure. The Jewish blessing — the land, power over enemies, and so on — is given to a seed said to be as many as the stars and the sand. But not a word about a multiplied seed appears where all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. The apostle argues here from that silence: no one is named there but Isaac, the one seed of Abraham, and a picture of the Lord sacrificed and risen.

The Seed risen from the dead has clearly broken the link with life or relationship on earth. He is in an entirely new condition, and in it He can bless the Gentile as freely as the Jew. This is what Christ is doing now, as this letter proves, entirely apart from law or circumcision.

Christ Himself, as man, might have had the promises. Yet He could not take up anything together with us except through death and resurrection. He could not be linked with man in the old Adam.

So the blessing was in Abraham only because, as to human descent, Christ came from Abraham… But the real power lay not in Abraham, but in Christ. And the very circumcision that would tie them outwardly to Abraham would in fact cut them off from Christ.

Isaac, Jacob and Judah were Abraham's seed. But they were only links in the chain, because the promise did not reach its fulfilment in them. It found its only fulfilment in Christ.

Just look at the use made of the singular instead of the plural… If we brought up points like this, people would call it interpretation at its most fanciful. Yet this is the method of the Spirit of God, and by it He shows that Christ was in His mind from the beginning.

We are Abraham's seed as a result of being Christ's. "If you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise" (Gal. 3:29). Being the seed of Abraham is a far lower privilege than the ones shown elsewhere — in the letter to the Ephesians, for example — as marking out the church.

Law is excluded from this covenant of promise. It has absolutely no place there. The apostle's proof is this: God made and confirmed it four hundred and thirty years before the covenant at Sinai. Even a man's covenant, once made and confirmed, cannot be reopened to insert new conditions. How simply impossible, then, to add the law as a condition to the covenant of grace!

If a man offers a reward and attaches a condition to it, that is fair. But suppose you said to someone: I intend to leave you my house and garden, with no condition attached. Then, a year or two later, you said to him: You must pay me a thousand pounds for the house and garden. He might answer: What do you mean? Do you take back your promise? You gave me the property with no conditions, and now you ask me for payment! God's promise to Abraham was absolute, and it must always remain untouched.

God took care that, between the promise given to Abraham and Isaac and the law, there should pass a period of more than four centuries. Had He given the law a short time after, they might have said it was all one and the same thing. But how could anyone think that, seeing that four hundred and thirty years passed between? The promise has its own special object, and the law has its design too; and we are not to mix the two things together.

The promise to Abraham came long before Israel went into Egypt. The law came after they came out. So according to this passage, their stay in Egypt must have been much less than four hundred years.

God had bound Himself to Abraham by promise 430 years before the law, having placed, so to speak, the blessing of the Gentiles in him. This promise was confirmed to his seed, and to only one; he does not say to the seeds, but "to the Seed," and it is Christ who is this Seed. A Jew would not deny this last point. The law came long after. It could not annul the promise God had already made and solemnly confirmed, so as to make it of no effect.

Dishonest men have an old trick. They get a document they dislike thrown out by adding to it something that contradicts its main terms, so the whole thing falls apart. This is not allowed among men, and we must not think of God's covenant of promise as less sacred than human documents. The law, which was not given until 430 years afterwards, has not annulled it. And nothing has been added to it to change its blessed simplicity. It was never meant to do either of these things.

The law does not clash with the promise. Each has its own object: the law is a ministry of death and condemnation, the promise one of blessing by faith. Mixing the two is what does the harm. This is exactly what people are prone to, and what Scripture always clearly sets aside.

Moses was the servant of God through whom the law came. Yet he falls back, not on the law covenant — everything was lost on that basis — but on the unconditional covenant God made much earlier with Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. By an instinct given to him by God, Moses in his plea left law for grace. On that ground his plea succeeded.