Galatians 4:9–10

With loving appeal he writes to them, "But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God." What an appeal, to turn from their knowledge of God to His knowledge of them! At best our knowledge of God is very imperfect. But He has taken us up in the perfect knowledge of all that we were and all that we would be. He has justified us by His grace as a free gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

When people fall away, he does what David did and finds his strength in God (1 Samuel 30:6). He turns for comfort from the work to the Workman: from sheep who were called but are changeable and careless, to the One who called them and never takes back His call. That they were "known by God" assured his own spirit more than anything he ever saw in them.

The word applies to children at the start of their training. It applies also to the law, the early way God dealt with Israel. But now the law is called "beggarly": it has lost its glory through the failure of man and the coming of Christ Himself.

The law was holy, just and good. Yet the moon is a weak and beggarly thing next to the sun, and so is the law next to the grace and power of the gospel. Think of the great story in Luke 15. The Father had welcomed the Galatians into His house and given them the place of a son, not the place of a hired servant. Yet here they were, going back with false humility — not quite to the care of the pigs in the far country, but to the drudgery of kitchen servants. They acted as if that were the way to keep the love the Father had showered on them.

This must have shocked the Galatian saints. Turning again to idolatry! How could this be? They might say, We are only taking up the principle of the law: do you call this the weak and beggarly elements? The apostle answers: before your conversion you worshipped false gods — idols. But if you, as Christians, take up Jewish principles, even these feast days or other principles of the law, then in principle you are idolaters. You are turning back to the very idolatry God rescued you from. It is not that the law in itself could be idolatrous. But these things had lost all their meaning, and a Gentile had nothing to do with them. They had their value as a shadow of Christ, before Christ came. To turn back from Christ risen from the dead to these mere shadows was, in God's sight, going back to idolatry.

The sabbath day is the seventh day of the week, the day God commanded in the law. Who would have suspected that keeping it was so evil a thing? Yet it was just this that frightened the apostle Paul about the Galatians. It meant slavery under the law. That is what made it so evil.

People still think that God must be served by human hands, as though He needed something. They do not know Him in His character as Giver, and so they do not come to Him to receive.

For example, the days would be keeping the Sabbath. The months would be the new moon. The seasons would be the different festivals we find in Leviticus 23. The years would be the sabbatical year every seven years, or the year of jubilee. They wanted to put themselves under all these regulations... The shadows given in the Old Testament pointed to Christ. But here the Galatians were going back to shadows Christ had already fulfilled. They were turning their backs on the sun and looking at the moon instead.

Who would have suspected that keeping the sabbath day was so evil a thing? It was the seventh day of the week, the day God commanded in the law. Yet it was just this that frightened the apostle Paul about the Galatians. It meant slavery under the law; that is what made it so evil.

Judaism was a system set up and once owned by God, being an expression of Christ in all its parts... But now Christ has come, and the substance of it all is here. Heavenly realities have come in. So a Judaism kept going by self-willed, blinded men is now idolatry. It is a religion of the senses, one the flesh can join in and enjoy. Things that once spoke of Christ are now weak and worthless elements, and the whole atmosphere is one of bondage.

This is formalism, designed to draw attention to themselves. It assumes that God required more righteousness of them at some times than at others. Such actions quietly excuse unrighteousness on "ordinary" days. How much of this we see in Christendom today! There are holy days and holy seasons, kept with great claims of spirituality — a spirituality thrown to the winds in ordinary life, and even in wild parties just before the holy days.

A Jewish believer might be excused for holding on to the customs of his forefathers, though the Spirit of grace still warns him (Rom. 14:3 and following). But for a converted Gentile to take them up was to show a basic ignorance of the grace in which he stood... Christ, the body and fullness of everything those shadows pictured, is the one continual festival of the saints. Days, months, seasons and years have dropped away, with all other legal burdens, from the cleansed conscience of the true worshipper of the Father.

If the Apostle looked at these Galatians only by what they were doing, he might well doubt whether they were true Christians. You do not have to be converted to observe days and seasons. This is a solemn thing for Christendom. Much of it has fallen into the same Galatian error, turning back again to outward ceremonies and to man-made holy days.

The believer is completely free from keeping "days and months and seasons and years." Being joined to a risen Christ has taken him right out of all such superstitious observances. Yet while this is wonderfully true, we see that "the first day of the week" has a place in the New Testament that no other day has. Let the Christian give it that place. It is a sweet and happy privilege, not a grievous yoke.