What does it mean that for freedom Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1)?

Verse 1. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ made us free," etc. Exhortation naturally follows doctrine. Presuming therefore on their acceptance of his corrective teaching in the foregoing chapters, the apostle now exhorts his recovered brethren to a renewed boldness and constancy in the assertion and maintenance of their standing in the true grace of God. Under the delusive guidance of the legalists, they had forgotten their true character, and in their infatuation had begun to speak and think as servants, not as sons. But their calling into the grace of Christ was of a different kind. We are changed, if truly in the faith of God's elect, from darkness to light, from sin to righteousness, from bondage to liberty, and from death to life. The act of our emancipation must not be confounded with our own perception and consequent enjoyment of it. The latter dates from and continues with our faith; the former was achieved when our once dead Deliverer revived. Christ made His people free when He shook off in person the fetters of the grave, and became the first-fruits of the resurrection unto life. His endurance of the curse was their exemption from the same; His blood-shedding was for the remission of their sins, but their ransom is Himself. Returning from His sacrificial bondage to both sin and death into the native liberty of His own unspotted and eternal righteousness, He thus brings forth His captives out of their prison-house, and settles them in the quiet resting-places of salvation. For He is Himself the life of His redeemed, and as their Forerunner He has entered into heaven itself, there to appear in the presence of God for them. The Son has returned to the Father, and they who know Him and confess His name rejoice now in the Spirit's conviction of righteousness, as He shows to them the person and the things of Christ (John 16:10). They are glad in the fulness of His joy, who after bearing our curse is now made most blessed for ever, for His own sake and for ours (John 14:28; Ps. 21:3-6). As called and anointed heirs of the grace of life, they are blessed with the blessing which is naturally His alone. Made free by the Son, they are now free indeed.

"Christ has set us free in freedom." (New Trans.) This is not the liberty of the flesh, for Christ has done it. The freedom which the Christian enjoys is His freedom. The believer has not to attain it, but to stand fast in it. To be entangled in a yoke of bondage is to give up Christ's liberty. To circumcise the flesh is to admit that one is in the flesh and not in Christ, for we cannot mingle the two. To be circumcised was to bring upon themselves the whole claim of the law, and to be deprived of profit from Christ, for they were then seeking for justification by law. It was giving up grace. It is well to be clear as to this, for nothing is more specious than the doctrine that we are indeed pardoned through the work of Christ, but that the flesh is to be kept in order by legal effort. This is only to give a place to the flesh, and to gratify it by being occupied with it, but by the same sacrifice of Christ wherein atonement for our guilt was made, God condemned sin in the flesh, and now justification and liberty are in Christ raised from the dead. "Christ has set us free in freedom."

Now go to Galatians, and see how this truth is presented there. I find the apostle saying, Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (Gal. 5:1). What is that? Getting under law. Nine-tenths of God's people today are under law as to their standing before God, and in their soul's relation to Him, hence they are in bondage. Paul urges us not to be entrapped by the yoke of bondage, because law occupies me with myself, and a man that is occupied with himself is bound to be wretched, because there is nothing in him that can answer to God's claims. You must learn that you are "dead to law by the body of Christ" (Rom. 7:4), and alive to God, before you can get liberty. A Christian is entitled to know this, hence the apostle says, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (Gal. 5:1). Liberty — freedom, is what belongs to a Christian; not liberty for the flesh, but emancipation from it, and from all that which kept the soul in bondage, darkness, and distance, so that we might be in the enjoyment of God, even as Christ is.

What a trumpet note of the Spirit to our souls we next hear: "For, brethren, ye have been called to liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another" (Gal. 5:13). The apostle is so angry with the legalist teachers — the men that put the Christian under law, and consequently into bondage — that he adds, "I would they were even cut off which trouble you" (ver. 12). Paul knew that love effects what law fails to produce, just as the gospel takes you much further than the law. The law says, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" The gospel teaches us to "lay down our lives for the brethren" (1 John 3:16). For this the believer in Christ has power, by the Holy Ghost; for the gospel gives you life, power, and an object, life in Christ, power by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, and then Christ personally as the object for the heart. The law did not give you any of these; the gospel gives you them all. Well may Paul say, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free" - i.e., hold firmly the very elements of the Christian calling — and then adds" only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another" (Gal. 5:13).

Freedom comes into the soul here. Let it not be shut out by not believing the flesh to be what the cross of Christ really proves that it is. Beware of that ally with the enemies of freedom which is within! Beware of self! Look not to self for good and remain in deserved bondage. Christian liberty comes through Christ's death; by His death the fetters of sin, and law, and the religion of the world, are broken asunder. To fight in our own strength against sin, or in ourselves to try to keep the law, or to subject ourselves afresh to ordinances, is to go back in spirit to the time before Christ died. Having passed through death, and being risen from among the dead, the Lord is our life. His people are in Him, where neither sin nor the power of the law, nor the effect of "weak and beggarly elements" can ever reach. Faith in Christ risen, makes these facts a reality to the soul experimentally. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." (Gal. 5:1.)

Having unfolded the true place of relationship and privilege in which the believer is set, the apostle exhorts the Galatians to stand fast in it. He speaks of it as "the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free." The law he calls "the yoke of bondage"; and anyone who slips away in his mind from the liberty of Sonship before the Father, to the bondage of law-keeping as determining his relations with God, has indeed become "entangled." In his own mind he may intend to take up only one small item of the whole number of legal observances, such as-circumcision, but if he touches law-keeping for justification at all, he becomes entangled in the whole system and cannot free himself.

Believers , then, are to "stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." The believing Jew stood thus delivered from the curse of the law, accounted righteous before God, by the faith of Jesus Christ: no longer a bond slave, but now a son, an heir of God. The believing Gentiles are brought into the same blessed relationship of children of God. And because sons, God had sent forth the Spirit of his Son into their hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Both were to stand in this happy liberty, where all was of God, on the principle of promise. Now, to go back to seek righteousness by the law, was to be entangled again in bondage. Paul assured them, "that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing. For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law." Does not this, then, shew the fearful danger of seeking to mingle Christ and law together? And yet what is more commonly done? We have seen man fully tested under law for fifteen centuries, and found only guilty, whilst the law demanded perfect obedience; man a debtor to do the whole law, yet none righteous, no, not one. The scripture hath concluded all under sin.

Now God in this epistle presents to us the forgiveness of sins, and also the death of the sinner in the person of the One who satisfies God as to the question of his sins. This is Paul's gospel (chapter 1), wherein, he says, the "righteousness of God" is revealed on the principle of faith. God's righteousness "upon all who believe" (chapter 3) when we had none to offer Him (see chapter 3), and Christ now before God instead of myself, in whom I am, according to Romans 8:1. This is how the power and grace of God have triumphed. "It" (the gospel) "is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." And this word salvation, thus brought out in the first chapter, is no mean measure; it is what God's heart desires to be proclaimed to every poor sinner "for the obedience of faith." As it was in the synagogue of Nazareth (Luke 4) so it is now, "deliverance to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." To accept it is to be "free indeed," no longer a servant, but a son; "and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ." (Gal. 4) How appropriate the exhortation of the apostle to these law-keeping Galatians: "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." Yet though we are not Jews, and so not under the law of Moses, how often we make laws for ourselves, not reckoning ourselves dead, not accepting the truth, and thus are landed again under a yoke of bondage, in which case the true Christian liberty is not known. How common is the thought, in respect of worldliness for example, (though the principle applies to other things), "I ought not to be so worldly, nor to do what the world does." This is admitted; but it is the old man you are addressing as if alive; you have allowed yourself to "be" what is inconsistent with a dead man. Had you met the enemy at the outposts with the truth, "I am dead," because you have accepted it by faith, you had not been betrayed into a path and conduct you now sorrow over, a path of servitude, and not of liberty, in which you find yourselves in Rom. 7, and do not know the truth of Romans 8 as your abiding portion and joy.

"Christ is the end of the law for righteousness TO EVERY ONE THAT BELIEVETH." The law has nothing to say to, it has no jurisdiction over, the one who believes in Jesus. No matter how great the terror or bitter the bondage in which it held him anterior to his faith. Christ is the end of it, in Christ he is beyond its reach for ever. There toils a slave for a hard master on a West African shore, but in his misery he has heard of a way by which he can be free, and in eager hope he scans the sea. At last there greets his longing eyes the sight for which he looked — a ship flying the Union Jack. He plunges into the water, and with strong and rapid strokes he cleaves the waves until he stands at last where no slave breathes — upon the deck of a British ship, a bit of British possession. So the one who is in Christ is free; once, "in the flesh," he quailed and groaned beneath the terrible demands of a holy law, but now in Christ there is no condemnation; and all who are in Him are free men; and it is here that grace puts all who believe, so that Christ becomes the end of all the toiling and wretchedness and despair into which the law plunged the awakened soul who found that his whole nature as in the flesh was contrary to it. "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death."

"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." — Galatians 5:1.

Those addressed in this epistle had known the liberty of the gospel. A person must first have tasted liberty before he can truly be exhorted to "stand fast" in it. You could not say to a poor slave working in chains, Stand fast in liberty. No; he must first be set free. So it is spiritually. Many do not know gospel liberty. Some are so accustomed to the slavery of sin, that they are not conscious of the real bondage they are in; others have, more or less, a feeling sense of the miserable condition of their hearts and ways, and long for deliverance from guilt and fear. Other persons seem only to think of liberty and independence in relation to their fellow-men. Perhaps they have striven for it, and have in some measure realized it; but they know nothing of the glorious liberty of the children of God. The Son of God came down from heaven to make men free. He preached liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. He gave His life a ransom for many.

I connect this with what Paul says in verse 1, “Stand fast,”or, “Stand firm.”This liberty is something to enjoy in the Christian experience, but it is also something that is hard to understand. Christian liberty is not legalism. This is the way that the enemy wants people to go; legalism is the opposite of Christian liberty. Further, Christian liberty does not mean license, we will see in chapter 6 that we are under the law of Christ. This is a new law, a new order of things, the law of Christ relates to the new nature. God does not force us to obey His commands; rather, he has given us a nature that desires to do exactly what He wants us to do. James speaks about the royal law (Jas.2:8) and the law of liberty (Jas.2:12) so there is obligation but not in the sense of a bondage. In one sense we are bondmen of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, but it is not in the sense of bondage that we have seen in connection with Hagar at the end of chapter 4, a system that is in bondage with her children (v.25) which is characteristic of Judaism, and which Paul calls “a yoke of bondage”(5:2). No, that is something that is entirely different from God’s thoughts. If we are under such bondage, we will not be able to serve God effectively, nor will we be able to worship Him well. A yoke of bondage will stop the believer from going on. There will be all kinds of hindrances and that is what Paul wants to prevent. We are set free from such bondage, we are set free from paganism, set free from this religious side of bondage and set at liberty. This liberty is a precious thing, and it is constantly under attack. Many are the forces seeking to move away the saints either towards legalism or towards license. Therefore, we have to have our focus right in connection with this liberty and that is why he says, “Stand firm.”When it comes to the enjoyment of these precious Christian truths there is always this challenge to stand firm, so we will not lose them, but that we will enjoy this position of liberty in true fellowship with God. In every epistle Paul gives encouragement in this sense, to hold fast.