CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES
Galatians 4:9. How turn ye again [anew]?—Making a new beginning in religion, lapsing from Christianity just in as far as they embrace legalism. To the weak and beggarly elements.—Weak is contrasted with power as to effects, and beggarly with affluence in respect of gifts. The disparaging expression is applied; not to the ritualistic externalism of heathen religions, but rather to that God-given system of ritualistic ordinances which had served the Church in her infancy. That which was appropriate food for a babe or sick man is feeble and poor for a grown man in full health.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Galatians 4:8-11
Legalism a Relapse.
I. Legalism is no advance on heathenism—“When ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods” (Galatians 4:8). Paganism was an elaborate system of formalism. The instinct of worship led men to sacrifice to imaginary deities—gods which were no gods. Ignorant of the true God, they multiplied deities of their own. The Galatian pagans created a strange Pantheon. There were their old, weird Celtic deities before whom our British forefathers trembled. On this ancestral faith had been superimposed the frantic rites of the Phrygian mother Cebele, with her mutilated priests, and the more genial and humanistic cultus of the Greek Olympian gods. The oppressive rites of legalism were little better than the heathen ritual. Religion degenerated into a meaningless formality. Dickens describes how in Genoa he once witnessed a great festa on the hill behind the house, when the people alternately danced under tents in the open air and rushed to say a prayer or two in an adjoining church bright with red and gold and blue and silver—so many minutes of dancing and of praying in regular turns of each.
II. Legalism, to converted heathen, is a disastrous relapse.—“After ye have known God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements?… Ye observe days and months and times and years” (Galatians 4:9-10). The heathen in their blindness and ignorance might be excused, and ritualism, even to the Jews before the coming of the Messiah, might be well enough; but for Christians, who had received ampler knowledge and been illumined by the Holy Spirit, to return to the weak and beggarly elements, was irrational, monstrous! Having tasted the sweets of liberty, what folly to submit again to slavery! having reached spiritual manhood, how childish to degenerate! Legalism destroys the life of religion, and leaves only a mass of petrified forms. In his Stones of Venice, Ruskin says: “There is no religion in any work of Titian’s; there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or sympathies either in himself or those for whom he painted. His larger sacred themes are merely for the exhibition of pictorial rhetoric—composition and colour. His minor works are generally made subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the Frari church is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connection between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who surround her. Bellini was brought up in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of Venice had expired.”
III. A relapse to legalism is an occasion of alarm to the earnest Christian teacher.—“I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain” (Galatians 4:11). The apostle knew something of the fickleness of the Galatians and of the weakness of human nature, but was hardly prepared for such a collapse of the work which he had built up with so much anxiety and care. He saw, more clearly than they, the peril of his converts, and the prospect of their further defection filled him with alarm and grief. It meant the loss of advantages gained, of precious blessings enjoyed, of peace, of character, of influence for good. It is a painful moment when the anxious Christian worker has to mourn over failure in any degree.
Lessons.—
1. Legalism suppresses all religious growth.
2. Is a constant danger to the holiest.
3. Shows the necessity for earnest vigilance and prayer.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Galatians 4:8-11. The Dilemma of Turn-coats.
I. Their first condition was one of ignorance.—
1. Ignorance of God.
(1) The light of nature is imperfect, because we know by it only some few and general things of God.
(2) It is weak, because it serves only to cut off excuse, and is not sufficient to direct us in the worship of God.
(3) It is a great and grievous sin.
2. Idolatry.—
(1) When that which is not God is placed and worshipped in the room of the true God.
(2) When men acknowledge the true God, but do not conceive Him as He will be conceived, and as He has revealed Himself.
(3) What a man loves most, cares for most, and delights in most, that is his God. Where the heart is, there is thy God.
II. Their changed condition is the knowledge of God in Christ.—
1. This is a special knowledge whereby we must acknowledge God to be our God in Christ.
2. This knowledge must be not confused, but distinct.
(1) We must acknowledge God in respect of His presence in all places.
(2) In respect of His particular providence over us.
(3) In respect of His will in all things to be done and suffered.
3. This knowledge must be an effectual and lively knowledge, working in us new affections, and inclinations.
III. Their revolt is an abandonment of salvation.—It is an exchange of knowledge for ignorance, of the substance for the shadow, of reality for emptiness—a return to weak and beggarly elements. It is the substitution of ceremonies for genuine worship.
IV. The conduct of turn-coats is an occasion of ministerial disappointment and alarm (Galatians 4:11).—Work that is in vain in respect of men is not so before God.—Perkins.
Galatians 4:8-9. Ignorance of God a Spiritual Bondage.—
1. However nature’s light may serve to make known there is a God and that He ought to be served, it is nothing else but ignorance, as it leaves us destitute of the knowledge of God in Christ, without which there is no salvation.
2. Men are naturally inclined to feign some representation of the Godhead by things which incur in the outward senses, from which they easily advance to give divine worship unto those images and representations.
3. Though the Levitical ceremonies were once to be religiously observed as a part of divine worship leading to Christ, yet when the false teachers did urge them as a part of necessary commanded worship, or as a part of their righteousness before God, the apostle is bold to give them the name of “weak and beggarly elements.”
4. People may advance very far in the way of Christianity, and yet make a foul retreat afterwards in the course of defection and apostasy.—Fergusson.
Galatians 4:9-10. God’s Sabbatic Law antedated the Mosaic Law.—And whatever of legal bondage had been linked with the observance of the Jewish Sabbath was eliminated together with the change to the first day of the week. This at once removes the Lord’s Day from the category of days, and also of weak and beggarly elements. The mode of observance is learned from the Lord’s words, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” which at the same time imply, when rightly understood, the perpetual necessity for a Sabbath.—Lange.
Galatians 4:11. Ministerial Anxiety—
1. Prompts to earnest efforts in imparting the highest spiritual truths.
2. Looks for corresponding results in consistency of character and conduct.
3. Is grieved with the least indications of religious failure.