Galatians 2:17 Commentary and Bible Study

We need to understand what Paul means by ‘while we seek to be justified by Christ’, or ‘seeking to be justified by Christ’ as the Greek says. What time is he referring to? Is this about the time we first came to Christ, that is, to our conversion? Or is it referring to time after that, when we began to live as believers who are justified by Christ? The answer to that will determine how the rest of the verse is interpreted, and verse 18 also. If he means the time after conversion – the Christian life itself – then the meaning of ‘we ourselves are found sinners’ will have to be that, in living our lives as believers we are incurring sin that we would not otherwise have incurred. How so? Because we are failing to keep the law, particularly the ceremonial law. This would have to be an argument put forward by the Judaizers, who would say that by no longer observing the law we are sinning through this omission in ways that we did not sin before. Christ then has become the minister of sin, in that the life he has called us to is a life which neglects the law. Peter has seen this and has put this right again by going back to his life of obedience to the law. Christ is made the minister of sin because he has encouraged us to abandon the law and he is found inadequate to fully justify us without the additional help of the law. Peter’s returning to the law has exposed this weakness in the justification offered by Christ. But if Paul is referring to our coming to Christ in the first place, the verses make much better sense. We are agreed, he says, that the law cannot justify any, whether Jew or Gentile, for only by faith in Christ shall any be justified. But if it is necessary for Jews to see themselves as sinners and no better than Gentiles before they can embrace Christ, then Christ seems to be the minister of sin. Hasn’t Christ turned a righteous Jew into the equivalent of a sinful Gentile? He is talking about the steps that had to be taken in coming to Christ in the first place, not about something that takes place after conversion as part of the Christian life. While you and I, Peter, sought to be justified by the law we could consider ourselves as more righteous than the Gentiles, but in seeking to be justified by Christ, we were obliged to abandon our confidence in the law and to place ourselves on the same footing as sinful Gentiles. The argument is not that Peter has made Christ the minister of sin by going back to the law, but that he could be seen as making Christ the minister of sin in coming to him in the first place. But that is false, and Paul strongly refutes the charge.Paul raises this subject because, in no longer eating with the Gentiles, Peter has gone back on what he did originally when he came to Christ for salvation. At that time he stopped depending on the law for righteousness, and in doing so it was necessary for him to forsake the imagined righteousness he had from the law. He was forced to admit that he was a sinner like all other men. But by reversing that decision and eating seclusively with Jews, he seems to be saying that that legal righteousness is, after all, still very important to him, and he must put right something that is defective in his Christian life. Paul agrees that he and Peter did have to admit they were sinners before they came to Christ, but he strongly disagrees with what Peter is doing to try to correct this. Has Christ made sinners where there were no sinners before? ‘God forbid’, says Paul. Of course, in one sense Christ does make all men to be sinners, for he makes them conscious of their sin and shows them what they really are. He makes Jews, who think they have a special relationship with God, realise that these imagined advantages are not real and they are no better than the Gentiles. But Christ does not make any man to be a sinner who was not a sinner already, and therefore he is not the minister of sin, but the revealer of sin.