Galatians 4:25 Commentary and Bible Study

Paul says that earthly Jerusalem, the Jerusalem which existed in his day, is a picture of bondage corresponding to the state of Hagar. This would have surprised the Galatians and outraged the Judaizers. How can Jerusalem be said to be in bondage when in the Old Testament she is called the holy city (Nehemiah 11:1; Isaiah 52:1; Zechariah 8:3; etc.), the city of David, and Zion (1 Kings 8:1), the ‘holy hill of Zion’ (Psalm 2:6), the ‘joy of the whole earth’, ‘the city of the great King’ (Psalm 48:2)? The mistake was to apply these wonderful prophecies to the present earthly Zion, when in fact they referred to the heavenly Zion or Jerusalem. Paul tells them to look higher than earthly Jerusalem, for it had not escaped the corruption which belongs to this fallen world. The sad truth was that while many in Israel remained satisfied with the earthly and refused to see the need for the heavenly, they had never really left Sinai. They had made the physical journey from Arabia to the Promised Land, but they had not made the equivalent spiritual journey and remained spiritually on Mount Sinai and in bondage under the covenant of law. As such they were still in bondage and were represented by Hagar and not by Sarah, the freewoman. Hagar is a type of all those Jews who received the outward benefits of the Abrahamic covenant but who never came to faith. It is this that makes Paul mourn for his own nation (Romans 9:1-5).The Book of Revelation refers to Jerusalem that now is as Sodom and Egypt (Revelation 11:8), and the prophets speak in the same terms (Isaiah 1:9-10; 3:9; Jeremiah 23:14). Unconverted Israel was never prepared to see itself this way because it would not relinquish its imagined place of advantage in the Abrahamic covenant. Unbelieving Jews thought that God’s earthly promises to them were a sign that God loved them as a nation regardless of whether they lived in obedience or not, but the truth was that unless they profited from the tutorship of the law and came to Christ, they were no better than children in a school who fail to graduate. What is to be done with such children and how should they be regarded when the school only exists to prepare the child for adult life? They must be discarded as failed pupils, as an egg that never hatched, as a tree that never bore fruit. Without faith, everything associated with the earthly Israel including its capital Jerusalem, became a curse not a blessing. All the advantages that belonged to Abraham’s physical descendants were only potential and not actual. If they failed to benefit from the schoolmaster of the law, they were left with absolutely nothing; indeed, their condemnation was all the greater because they knew their master’s will and yet did not prepare themselves to do it (Luke 12:47).