Galatians 3:25 Commentary and Bible Study

After Christ, the object of faith, has come into the world, all men are directed to focus on him alone. Israel, who had been allowed to worship according to the types and shadows of the law, was now commanded to leave behind those elementary principles and to embrace the far more excellent glory of Christ to which those types had all along pointed. To continue to prefer the old wine of the law of Moses betrayed a weakness of mind that was unable to keep in step with God’s program, and loved those things for their own sake rather than for what they signified. At the incarnation, Israel’s education is complete and she had reached the age when it is time to graduate from school. The child is grown up; school days are a happy memory and lessons learned there are now to be put into practice as the emancipated adult engages with life. He may still meet the one who used to be his schoolmaster, but he no longer submits to him as he used to, and the master’s relationship to the former child is also changed, for the master must let go and not try to assert an authority which he is not entitled to assert. He has no authority to punish anymore; neither can he force his former pupil to do work. All of this is said to show the Galatians the foolishness of wishing to return to the law. It would be doubly foolish for the Gentile Galatians to desire to be under a yoke which God had even set Israel free from, for Israel underwent this bondage not only for its own sake but to be a lesson to the whole world. The law had never given righteousness to Israel, and therefore nothing could be gained by the Gentiles voluntarily placing themselves under it.