Galatians 4:27 Commentary and Bible Study

First, we must understand that Paul is the perfect interpreter of Isaiah 54:1 which he quotes here. He does not bend it to suit his own purpose, but quotes it to show Old Testament support for his doctrine and therefore lets it speak for itself unchanged. The point which he is proving is that the Gentiles are the spiritual children of the same mother, for ‘Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all’ – believing Jews and believing Gentiles. But how does this quotation from Isaiah prove this unless it includes a reference to the Gentiles? Isaiah describes two women, one of whom has never had the joy of given birth, for she has no husband. She looks on in sorrow at the other – the married woman and her children – but there seems to be no prospect of her ever having the children she longs for. However, remarkably, this situation will in future be altogether different. The husband of course is the Lord, but who do these two women represent? The idea that Isaiah is comparing Israel before and after the exile misses the point entirely, and Paul’s use of the passage rules this out. So too does the view that it is a reference to future Jewish blessing, for he quotes Isaiah to show the blessings of the international Jewish-Gentile church, of which the Gentile Galatians are also members, in which all have the same status. The comparison is between Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church. The Gentiles are represented by the woman who is initially described as desolate, but who, in the providence of God, turns out to have many more children than the married wife. The meaning is that the Gentiles initially appeared to be shut out of the promise, because the terms of God’s blessing seemed to limit his favour to ethnic Jews, descended from Abraham. In Old Testament times the Gentiles were like a woman who had been rejected in favour of another, so that she looked on as a desolate woman at the favoured woman, Israel, who had found a husband. The contrast is therefore between Jerusalem that now is and Jerusalem which is above, between the Old Testament state of affairs and the New, between the national covenant which pointed to Christ but did not itself provide salvation and the covenant of grace which saves all who are in it, between unregenerate national Israel and the regenerate Jewish-Gentile church, between an earthly people of God and the true heavenly people of God. In the Old Testament God with rare exceptions dealt exclusively with the nation of Israel, but the New Testament transformed this situation, for the number of those brought to faith from the Gentiles far exceeded the number of those who belonged to national Israel. The worshipping community of the Old Testament must ‘enlarge the place of [her] tent’, because God is going to add greatly to her through the call of the Gentiles (Isaiah 54:2-3).