I would that they would even cut themselves off who throw you into confusion.
Here Paul's anger breaks out. The men pressing circumcision on the Galatian believers get one blunt wish from him. Older translations read "cut off" where the ESV is blunter, and much depends on what that cutting means.
The trouble came from teachers who pressed circumcision and the law of Moses on the Galatians:
A more exact translation of the passage is: "I would even that they would cut themselves off who throw you into confusion." The apostle's desire is that these Judaizing teachers might indeed separate themselves from the Galatian assemblies. Their teaching brought confusion there, urging the Galatians to get circumcised and keep Moses' law (ch. 6:12). So their effort to have the Galatians circumcised is turned back on themselves. Let them circumcise themselves — that is, cut themselves off from you, says the indignant apostle... The whole letter was written to expose their subtle teaching and to free God's people from them.
Commentators differ. Some read it as a wish that the teachers would leave the fellowship they were unsettling. Others hear Paul pushing their own logic to its grim end:
In verse 10 we saw one particular person. Now Paul speaks in the plural, "they." He says, as it were, "I would that they would mutilate, or cut themselves off." This is really what Paul is saying: they might use the knife for circumcision, so let them castrate themselves. He is mocking them. In Philippians 3:2 he calls this religious action by another name, "the concision." That is another term of contempt for these people who were always cutting. They wanted to cut, but no amount of cutting would benefit them.
Read the other way, the wish lets the troublemakers leave on their own. That spares the assembly a painful duty:
Those who have a character of self-righteousness cannot long endure a single-hearted, steadfast devotion to the grace of the Lord Jesus alone. Such devotion will irritate them more than anything else... It is better if people decide to leave on their own than for the assembly to carry out a solemn excommunication. Then the responsibility rests on their own shoulders.
Paul is sharper with the Galatians than with the Corinthians, who tolerated open immorality. Here is why:
It is solemn to find the same word "leaven" in both letters. In 1 Corinthians it describes frightful moral corruption. In Galatians it marks the bringing in of the system of law among the children of God. God treats it as a most offensive thing. Indeed, the tone of the Holy Spirit in writing to the Galatians is even more severe than in writing to the Corinthians. The Corinthians were guilty of what men would blame far more. But the Galatians had fallen into an error that struck deeper at the foundations of God's grace... "Faith which works by love" does not hesitate to use strong language about the corrupters of the Church of God — it denounces them most earnestly, and as a duty to God and man.
The heat came from love, not from a lack of it:
His love for the truth and the welfare of believers made him intolerant of those whose teaching was destructive of Christian truth, robbing the saints of true liberty.
Yet the wish stays a wish. Paul leaves the judging to his Lord, and his tone toward the believers keeps shifting between rebuke and comfort:
It was no time for civilities and smoothness of speech... truth has no courtesies for falsehood. Love is of God, and deals always with the sincerity and truth belonging to its source. A true servant of righteousness shows consideration not to those who do wrong, but to those who suffer it. Paul's tone to the Galatian saints is by turns severe and kind. He warns them or comforts them as he works to restore their souls... Yet his anger is with meekness still. He wishes, but his Lord alone can act as the avenger of His name.
The outburst is not an ending. It opens straight into the positive thing Paul is fighting for:
We also see the trouble of his spirit, and it marks the whole letter: "I would that they were even cut off that trouble you. For, brothers, you have been called to liberty." That principle, taken with what follows, is of the utmost importance. The Christian was called to liberty — the holy liberty of the new nature, but liberty all the same.
- Trouble. Teachers pressed circumcision and the law of Moses on the Galatians. Their message threw the assemblies into confusion.
- Turnabout. Paul aims their own knife-talk back at them. Either leave the assembly, or, on the harsher reading, cut deeper still — no amount of cutting helps.
- Threat. The severity matches the danger. Scripture calls this error leaven, and it struck deeper at the foundations of grace than the open scandal at Corinth.
- Tone. Love for the truth makes the apostle intolerant here. His anger stays with meekness, and he leaves the judgment to his Lord.
- Treasure. All of it guards one thing: the holy liberty of the new nature, which the Galatians were trading away.
For *ye* have been called to liberty, brethren; only [do] not [turn] liberty into an opportunity to the flesh, but by love serve one another.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself;
The Galatians were turning back to the law of Moses. Paul answers with the law's own summary: it all comes down to loving your neighbor as yourself. So does he put Christians back under law? Or does he show that only those set free from it ever meet what it asks?
The verse opens with "for," so it gives a reason: freedom is meant for serving. One writer shows how grace, not law, produces that life:
God gave the law to convince of sin; the flesh would use it to work out righteousness. He acts in grace, so that we may be above sin and outside its rule. The flesh would use grace as an opportunity to sin without restraint. The Christian, truly free from the yoke of sin as well as from its condemnation... instead of serving his lusts, seeks to serve others, free to do it in love. So the law itself is fulfilled, and we are not under its yoke. The whole practical law comes down to this one word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
Much hangs on the word "fulfilled." It does not mean the same as "obeyed." The same writer marks the difference:
This one commandment itself amounts to keeping the whole law — filling up the measure of its requirements. It is not, "He who has done this has obeyed this as law," but "He who has done this has, in every respect, done all that the law aims at." The whole righteous requirement of it is met.
Paul cites only the second of the two great commandments. Commentators read that silence in different ways. One takes it as deliberate — Paul keeps clear of the first table, the commands about loving God:
When the apostle speaks of this point, which he does more than once, he never speaks of the first table. Not only that, he declares that the whole law is fulfilled in loving one's neighbour as one's self. See Romans 13:8-9; Galatians 5:14. So when this point is before him, he avoids saying that love to God is included, and in fact calls the whole law love to our neighbour.
Another answers that the greater command has taken a new form in Christ, and that no one keeps the lesser one without it:
He does not mention here the other and greater of the two, because the old commandment has taken a new form since God Himself fulfilled it in His Son (1 John 4:10-11). Yet he is bold to say that all the law is fulfilled in this one saying. The law is one and not many, and the same Spirit runs through all its words... No one who does not love God can truly love his brother. So to keep the lesser charge is to fulfil the whole commandment.
The verse tells us what the law wants. It does not tell us where to get it:
The law demands love, but it gives no ability to meet its demands. Being holy, it can only condemn us, since we have all failed to meet what it asks.
Another writer points to what fills that gap:
If they turned to law, the law was fulfilled in this way and no other. It was not fulfilled by putting themselves under it, but by the love that comes from the presence of the Spirit of God. For "the fruit of the Spirit is love."
Paul's choice of command carries a sting for anyone eager to be under law:
Love of others absolutely cuts off selfishness. Selfishness is the unvarying motive of the legalist, for he seeks blessing for himself, not for others. So the more legal-minded one is, the more thoroughly he ignores the claims of the Law in which he boasts!
Does Paul's use of this command prove Christians are still under law? One writer answers with a courtroom picture:
Paul's appeal to the law was most apt for the Galatians. They wished to put themselves under the law, and what is more telling than to show them that the law itself condemned them? But we can quote the law as showing God's mind without putting ourselves under it. Some of our judges have cited Roman law in their judgments, because of its admitted excellence. Who imagines that these judges held Roman law to be binding in our country? If God lays down principles in the law, they must be perfect, and Paul quotes them as such.
- Called — grace does not free the flesh to sin; it frees the Christian to serve others in love.
- Given — the law demanded love but supplied none; the Spirit supplies the love the law only asked for.
- Fulfilled — to love your neighbor is not to obey a rule but to reach everything the law was aiming at.
- Summed — one command holds the whole law, because the law is one and not many.
- Tested — the legalist seeks blessing for himself, so he ignores the very law he boasts in.
but if ye bite and devour one another, see that ye are not consumed one of another.
The Galatians were trying to live by the law, and this verse shows what came of it. Paul's words picture animals tearing at each other, and they raise a hard question: how did people so eager to keep the law end up destroying each other?
The verse reads like a warning about the future. One writer points out that the trouble was already there.
His words take the form of a caution. But they plainly have in view an evil that is not distant and merely possible. It was already at work in their gatherings. How quickly and how bitterly their inward slide from grace to law was showing its practical effects! With a lower standing, lower morals had come too. Each one should have valued the other above himself, in self-forgetting brotherly affection. Instead there was a self-conscious rivalry among them, in which each destroyed the other.
One writer names the soil these quarrels grow in, and gives a sharper wording of Paul's warning.
The apostle warns these believers: "If you keep on biting and devouring one another, beware lest you should be consumed by one another." The law makes men hard; the law knows nothing of love. In soil like that, quarrels grow fast, and the biting and devouring soon appear. Each man thinks he is standing for righteousness, when all the time he is only trying to force his own will on his neighbour. Proverbs tells us that quarrels between brothers are like the bars of a castle — cold and straight, each one held away from the other by the cold stone it is set in (Proverbs 18:19). That is the result of a heart that puts itself under law. Another translates these words: "If you are always snarling and snapping at one another, beware that you are not destroyed by one another."
The Galatians were proud of the law. Paul answers by pointing at the results it produced in them.
Had they not been trying the law? And what had been the result? He says, You have been biting and devouring one another: that is not fulfilling law, but lusts. When people talk about it, or want to be its teachers, do they ever fulfil it? It begins with confident words, and ends without deed or truth.
There is a motive under the biting. One writer names it, and shows where it ends.
The vanity of the flesh will always lead to fault-finding, and to belittling others, in the effort to exalt self. In this way strife and contention spring up among the people of God. Once brothers start biting and devouring one another, they may well "take heed." If they do not judge this spirit, it will not be long before they consume one another. How many companies of God's people have fallen apart and scattered, because people fought and insulted one another instead of serving one another in love!
The Galatians hoped the law would make them holy. One writer traces where it actually took them.
Living by law leads to the very opposite of love in action. The Galatians had to beware. Their pursuit of holiness by law might only lead them to the unholy end of consuming one another in their arguments and criticisms. They would avoid the offence of the cross, only to come to complete ruin in the offence their own unholy conduct produced. It is sad to say it, but this just sums up the history of Christendom.
The same spirit can enter the way a church corrects its members.
It is to be feared that more and more, in practice, people see the assembly's part in discipline as enforcing what is really law, not grace. They forget the tender compassion of Christ toward His own, and the word to the Galatians becomes a necessary warning for us.
Paul does not stop at the warning. He moves straight to the positive remedy in the following verse.
They were giving in to the flesh and attacking those who were not circumcised. If they devoured one another like this, they were to take heed that they were not consumed by one another. But the apostle would give something more positive… "Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh." Putting yourself under the law gives no power against sin. It is the Spirit… who is the Christian's strength.
- Cause — the slide from grace to law came first. The quarrelling followed, because the law knows nothing of love and hardens those who take it up.
- Motive — the biting is pride in disguise. People find fault and belittle others so that self may look bigger.
- Contradiction — they boasted in the law, yet served their own desires. Confident words, no deed or truth.
- Cost — whole companies of God's people scattered. They escaped the offence of the cross and fell into the worse offence of their own conduct.
- Cure — not stricter rules but the Spirit. His power, not law, is the Christian's strength against the flesh.