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.