Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?
Desire - of your own accord madly courting that which must condemn you.
Do ye not hear - do ye not consider the inner sense of Moses' words? The law itself sends you away from it to Christ. Do ye not heed it? Having sufficiently maintained his point by argument, the apostle illustrates it by an allegorical exposition of historical facts. He confutes the Judaizers with their own weapons. But their allegorical interpretations in the synagogues were unauthorized by the Spirit. (Compare the Jerusalem Talmud, Succa, cap. Hechalil.) His allegorical exposition is not the work of fancy, but sanctioned by the Holy Spirit. History, rightly understood, contains in its complicated phenomena continually-recurring divine laws. The history of the elect people, like their legal ordinances, had, besides the literal, a typical meaning (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:1-4; 1 Corinthians 15:45; 1 Corinthians 15:47; Revelation 11:8). Just as the extraordinarily-born Isaac, the gift of grace according to promise, supplanted, beyond all human calculations, the naturally-born Ishmael, so the new theocratic race, the spiritual seed of Abraham by promise, Gentile as well as Jewish believers, take the place of the natural seed, who imagined that to them exclusively belonged the kingdom of God.