Which things have an allegorical sense; for these are two covenants one from mount Sinai, gendering to bondage, which is Hagar.
Paul is writing to believers who were slipping back under law, so he turns to the law's own pages: Abraham's household, with two women and two sons. He says the story carries a meaning beyond itself — one woman stands for the covenant made at Sinai, and that covenant bears children for slavery.
Paul's move is deliberate. They would not listen to the gospel, so he points them to the book they were so eager to live under.
The Apostle now appeals to the law itself, to show how unreasonable it is to turn back to it. If they would not hear the gospel, nor listen to the Apostle, let them listen to the law they were turning to. At once he recalls the days of Abraham. He uses some facts from Abraham's life as an allegory. They teach us the contrast between the bondage of a believer under law and the liberty of a believer under grace.
Calling the account an allegory raises an obvious worry: is Paul turning history into a fable? Commentators answer that the events stand as events, and are used for a further purpose.
Real historical facts can sometimes carry an allegorical sense, as the apostle used the story of Hagar and Ishmael in Galatians 4:21-31. But they are still facts.
How far may we copy this method with other passages? One writer sets clear limits.
How do we guard against misusing what was written long ago? First, we must carefully refuse to start any doctrinal argument of our own from an earlier historical event, as an inspired writer has done here. Second, we must keep inside the limits of stated apostolic teaching when we try to draw a Christian sense out of the ancient Jewish Scriptures.
Each woman pictures a covenant — an agreement between God and man. The two agreements differ in what blessing depends on.
These two women stand for the two covenants. One is the covenant of law, which makes blessing depend on man carrying out his part. The other is the covenant of promise, in which man's blessing depends entirely on the sovereign grace of God. The two sons stand for the two conditions these covenants produce: the one a condition of bondage, the other of liberty.
Why does the first covenant run on those terms? The answer lies in what happened at the mountain.
Enjoying the results of the covenant depended on both sides being faithful. At Mount Sinai God promised blessing on His part, if Israel were faithful to His will. So Israel was bound to obey, to enjoy the privileges granted under the law. What God had promised to Abraham with no conditions attached, the people accepted at Sinai on condition of their own obedience.
Paul's charge is not that Israel broke the law. It is that the arrangement itself can only produce servants.
The law and the covenant of Sinai were tied to man in the flesh… For man, the law and its regulations were only bondage. They aimed at holding the will in check without changing it… And notice that the apostle is not speaking here about breaking the law, but about the principle of the law.
Hagar was Sarah's servant, and an Egyptian. Both details are read as saying something about the place law holds and where it tends to drift.
She is the covenant "from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery." It is the only kind of religion man's own thinking leads him to, and what we sink back to whenever grace is left behind. So Hagar is an Egyptian, a child of nature… God took up the principle of law for the purposes of His wisdom, but it was never His own thought. He uses it so that man, fully tested by it, may prove to himself the folly of his own ideas… How little Christians suspect this tendency in the very thing they use to seek holiness and fruit!
Since there are two, and only two, the practical conclusion is that they cannot be joined.
The two could not be united; the one shut out the other.
Another writer states the same conclusion as a warning about how Christians actually live and preach.
This mixing up of the law with the gospel is as harmful as it is unscriptural. "For you have not come" to Sinai, but to Zion, even had we been Jews. "By grace you have been saved through faith." It rests on a completely opposite principle.
- Two mothers. The two women in Abraham's house stand for two covenants: Hagar for the law given at Sinai, the other for the promise of grace.
- Two terms. Under the first, blessing depends on man keeping his side. Under the second, it rests on God's sovereign grace.
- Two births. The law deals with man in the flesh. It curbs the will but never changes it, so Sinai can bear nothing but slaves.
- Two lines that never merge. Law and gospel rest on opposite principles. Mixing them is harmful and unscriptural.
- Still true history. "Allegory" does not turn the story into fable. The events really happened. When we draw such meanings ourselves, we must keep to apostolic teaching.
For Hagar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which [is] now, for she is in bondage with her children;
Paul takes a family story from Abraham's household and reads it as a map of two religious systems. Hagar the slave woman stands for the covenant given at Sinai, and Paul puts the Jerusalem of his own day on her side of the line.
Each woman stands for a covenant. Each covenant then shapes the people under it.
These two women stand for the two covenants. One is the covenant of law. It makes the blessing depend on man carrying out his part of the covenant. The other is the covenant of promise. In it the blessing for man depends completely on the sovereign grace of God. The two sons stand for the two conditions that come out of these covenants: the one a condition of bondage, the other of liberty.
The link between the slave woman and the mountain was not just Paul's idea. It rested on how people in that region spoke.
The apostle's language here is bold. What truly justifies it is the divine authority by which he wrote. But it is also supported by its fitness as an allegory, and by a fact of geography that his readers most likely knew. Hagar was Sinai, and Sinai was Hagar, in the speech of the local people descended from the original slave woman. Keeping her name alive in that place gives a fair basis for the parallel he draws here.
Paul says the slave woman is in slavery "with her children." Another writer names who those children are, and why the law leaves them there.
Those who are under the law must keep the law in order to receive blessing. "Do this, and you will live" (Luke 10:28). This is bondage and slavery. We must work and do in order to obtain, and we can never obtain this way. Those who are under this covenant are those who put themselves under law, and they are slaves, like the children of Hagar. They are from Mount Sinai. God gave the law at Mount Sinai, and so Mount Sinai stands for the law. People think that Hagar went to Arabia when Abraham sent her away. So Arabia seems to speak of the land of slavery, or the bondage of the law.
Paul is not talking about a city's walls. He means a whole system of law with Jerusalem at its centre.
Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai. She answers to Jerusalem with her children — that is, to the system of the law of which Jerusalem was the centre — and also to those who are under the law. But Jerusalem which is above is free, and she is our mother. She is the true church of God seen in her heavenly state.
The teachers troubling the Galatians boasted about their standing. Paul answers by naming where Jerusalem now stands.
Hagar speaks to us of the energy of the flesh, and of bondage too. The apostle shows that this is where Jerusalem now is, whatever the boast of the law-teachers who had troubled the Galatians. "Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children" (v. 25). Yet the Jews boasted to the Lord that they were never in bondage to anyone (John 8:33)!
If the earthly city stands on the slave's side, the case for the law collapses. Its defenders end up with the wrong son.
The gospel does not go up to Jerusalem on earth. It does not try to join with the law or anything else here below. It wants no such allies, but rejects them all. The very reverse of their system is true. The true link is with Jerusalem above, as our pattern is Isaac, the child of the free woman. Theirs was the slave's son — Ishmael.
One writer names the reason bondage still appeals.
How strange, yet how true, that we should prefer spiritual bondage to spiritual freedom. But the reason is plain. If we are set free, it must be owing completely to the grace of God, and our proud hearts refuse to submit to this... When Christians lost the sense of a calling that is heavenly and not of this world, as the apostle's keen eye saw the Galatians beginning to do, they looked to Hagar, not to Sarah.
- Two mothers. Hagar carries the covenant where blessing depends on what man does. Sarah carries the covenant where blessing depends on God's grace alone.
- Two births. Each covenant gives its children a matching condition — bondage or liberty.
- Two addresses. Sinai in Arabia and the Jerusalem of Paul's day speak of the same thing. Both stand for the law. Both hold their children as slaves.
- Two claims. Paul puts those who boasted they were never slaves to anyone into the slave woman's household.
- Two choices. Pride prefers a system it can perform in. The gospel refuses that alliance and links us to the Jerusalem above.
but the Jerusalem above is free, which is our mother.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break out and cry, thou that travailest not; because the children of the desolate are more numerous than [those] of her that has a husband.
Paul backs his contrast between the two Jerusalems with a strange line from the prophets, where a childless woman gets a command to sing. Who is she, and why does God's richest harvest come in a season that looks like abandonment?
Paul takes the words from Isaiah 54. One writer points out what comes just before it.
Notice where this comes in the prophet's writings. In chapter 53 we have Israel bowing to the truth of the atonement, owning the once smitten One as having died for them. Then we hear the remarkable call quoted by the apostle in this letter. The truth is that in the coming day Israel will learn with astonishment what God has been doing during their long widowhood. They will find countless children born to Abraham — true children of promise.
Most readers assume the barren woman is Sarah, since Sarah fills the verses around it. Commentators differ here. Some read her as Sarah. Others insist the link runs elsewhere:
Verse 27 gives many minds some difficulty, because people confuse it with Hagar and Sarah. But it is a separate matter, suggested by the idea of the Jerusalem above. … The apostle quotes it to show that Jerusalem had more children during the time of her desolation than when she had a husband. … Sarah was not without a husband. Here is a different order of thought.
Another writer names the barren woman and traces the marriage language through Israel's history.
Paul quotes Isaiah 54 here. The barren one is not Sarah. It is Israel, as the context shows — the one who was without a husband. Israel had a husband. God took Israel as His wife (Jeremiah 2) — when He entered into that covenant relationship with her, she became His wife. But then she became unfaithful, and God had to send her away. … So she became desolate, without a husband, and so she had no children. … In the future Israel will come back to God. Then she will see what happened in the meantime: in the two thousand years that she was set aside as a nation, God brought in this harvest from the nations.
The verse reverses what anyone would expect. The empty years produced more than the favoured ones.
During this time God has set Israel aside. … Their house has indeed been left to them desolate (see Matthew 23:38). In that day it will seem amazing to them. They will find far more children born through the gospel in their desolation than in their days of greatest prosperity. The children brought in by grace are "more numerous" than those ever were under law. But these children do not belong to the earthly Jerusalem. They belong to the Jerusalem above, the heavenly Jerusalem, which is free.
Commentators also differ over which Jerusalem Isaiah 54 addresses. Some read it as the restored earthly city. One writer argues for the heavenly one, and counts the harvest twice over:
When God fulfils the prophecy in the millennial day, He will count those who now believe as Jerusalem's children, as well as the race to come in that day. … Think of her most flourishing times, say under David or Solomon. What fruit of those days could compare with the gathering in of Christian believers since the Jews lost their place as the recognised witness and wife of Jehovah?
Notice where the harvest began.
Jerusalem on earth and her children boasted in the law. Through the law they fell into bondage, and by breaking the law they became desolate. Still, the words of the prophet Isaiah show that during the time of her desolation there will be more children than when God owned the city as His earthly centre. Is this not because the very city that proved man's guilt became the place from which the gospel of God's grace went out to all the world?
The verse does more than report a fact. It commands singing. One writer ties that song to the difference between law and grace.
The barren woman bearing can only find utterance in praise. Outward greatness and glory can go with bondage. Men are slaves of sin, or of the law, or of the world, until they know redemption. … The law knew nothing of praise. Hagar's son was born of the flesh. Sarah's child was the child of God's grace and power.
- Desolate. The story starts with a wife sent away for unfaithfulness and a city left desolate. Nothing here begins with human strength.
- Fruitful. In those very years of desolation God has been gathering children. They outnumber all that came in the days of favour and law.
- Free. These children belong to the Jerusalem above, not to the earthly city. They are children of promise, born by God's grace and power, not of the flesh.
- Global. The message of grace went out from the very city that had proved man's guilt, and reached all the world.
- Singing. So the command is to rejoice. Only grace puts a song in a barren mouth, because the law knew nothing of praise.