Galatians 4:1-7 | “The Son Comes to Make Us Sons”

Preston Highlands Baptist Church

One Big Book of Advent

This season is often called “Advent,” from the Latin adventus meaning “coming” or “arrival.” It’s when the church considers the arrival of God in the coming of Jesus Christ.

The story of Jesus’ coming doesn’t begin in the New Testament and doesn’t end with a baby in a manger. The whole Bible anticipates his arrival. The Bible is one big book of Advent!

There are whispers of the Christmas story from Genesis to Revelation. Over these weeks, we’re listening to several of these “whispers.” We started in Genesis and we’ll end in Revelation at the end of the month.

The Bible doesn’t just tell us that God came to the earth, but why he came. Two weeks ago we looked at Genesis 3:15 and saw that God came to defeat evil. Last week we looked at Deuteronomy 18:18 and saw that God sent a prophet like Moses to bring God’s word to God’s people.

Today we’re going to move to the New Testament and look at Galatians 4:1-7. This text clearly says why Jesus was born. The main point of these verses is that God sent his Son so we could be sons. In this text, we’ll see our condition (vv. 1-3), our rescue (vv. 4-5), and our status (vv. 6-7). Because of God’s advent, we can move from slavery to salvation to sonship.

Our Condition

In verses 1-3, we see our condition before Jesus comes into our lives. Simply put, apart from Jesus, we’re slaves.

In verses 1-2, Paul says that a child who’s an heir is no different legally than a child who’s a slave. They’re both children no matter what they’ll inherit or not inherit later. A minor is legally deprived of his inheritance until he’s of age.

Then in verse 3 he draws a connection between this minor and our spiritual condition apart from Christ. But he takes the analogy further and says that “we” (i.e. Jews and Gentiles) aren’t just under guardians or managers, but that we’re slaves. Slaves to what? “To the elementary principles of the world.”

What does that mean? The word used for “elementary principles (or spirits)” can refer to one of four things: basic elements of religious teaching (i.e. law), basic substances of the physical world (earth, wind, water, fire), astrological deities, or spiritual beings in general.[1]

It seems to me that Paul is using the word in verse 3 to refer to the law. “Law” is a theme in verses 1-5. Paul says that Christ is born “under the law, to redeem those under the law” (vv. 4-5). In 3:23, he says that Jews “were held captive under the law.” So it seems that the “elementary principles of the world” that the Galatians were slaves to in verse 3 refers to the law (cf. Heb. 5:12).

In verse 9, Paul uses the same word, this time likely referring to spiritual beings. He says in verse 8 that Gentiles who don’t know God “were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods,” likely referring to the pagan belief in celestial gods behind the sun, moon, and stars. The reference to “days and months and seasons and years” in verse 10 refers to the belief that the astrological calendar governs our lives. Paul is saying that the Galatians are in danger of turning back to slavery to demonic spirits who led them to believe that the natural elements control their destiny rather than God.[2]

The Galatian Jews were slaves to the law and the Galatian Gentiles were slaves to demons. Both were slaves.

Paul wants us to see that spiritual slavery can look pagan or religious. The Galatian Christians were previously slaves to different things, but they were all slaves to something. What are you a slave to? Religious observance? Astrology? Ancestor worship? Secret sin?

Paul is saying that your life can be full of religious observance and you still be a slave spiritually. Remember what Jesus told the Pharisees? “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence…Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like white-washed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Mt. 23:25, 27-28).

Using religious observance to demonstrate your moral superiority is slavery, and exhausting. It’s why so many of us look good on the outside while we’re rotting away on the inside.

Remember the person Jesus says cleans their house but doesn’t fill it with anything and seven evil spirits return and “the last state of that person is worse than the first” (Mt. 12:43-45). You can have a clean house that’s empty of Jesus’ presence and power. When Jesus comes into the house of our lives, he not only cleans our house but fills them with his Spirit, setting us free from fear and manipulation and self-righteousness, setting us free to truly love and serve others expecting nothing in return.

We can be slaves even though we’re living an outwardly religious life. Our lives may look clean and moral and religious, but if we’re doing these things in our own power and for our own glory, we’re slaves to self-righteousness.

Paul says that our condition apart from Christ is slavery, that just because you’re religious doesn’t mean you’re not a slave.

Our Rescue

What did God do about all this? Would he let his people stay in bondage? Would he let the seed of the serpent win? What do slaves need? They need rescue and redemption. They need salvation. Verses 4-5 tell us that slaves can indeed be saved and become sons.

God, who exists outside of time, worked supernaturally in time to free his people, “When the fullness of time had come…” What he did was so world-changing that later Christians divided time by this event (BC and AD).

At just the right time, “God sent forth his Son.” This a wonderfully succinct summary of the gospel. The way God rescues his enslaved people is by sending his Son, the only person uniquely qualified to set God’s people free.

Who is the Son? The Son of God is not a created person but an eternal being, eternally begotten by the Father. Theologian Michael Reeves describes the mysterious glory of this Father-Son relationships:

“The Father is never without the Son but, like a lamp, it is the very nature of the Father to shine out his Son. And likewise, it is the very nature of the Son to be the one who shines out from his Father. The Son has his very being from the Father. In fact, he is the going out – the radiance – of the Father’s own being. He is the Son.”[3]

This means that the emancipator of God’s people is none other than God himself. When it came time to rescue his people, God sent himself to do the job. As one commentator says, “God sent his Son not just from Galilee to Jerusalem, nor just from the manger to the cross, but all the way from heaven to earth…In sending Jesus, God did not send a substitute or a surrogate. He came himself.”[4]

The Mystery and Wonder of God Made Flesh

But God’s advent is subtle, not noticed by most. He didn’t come as some sort of Greek god or Roman warrior or force of nature. Instead, the eternal Son of God was “born of woman, born under the law” (v. 4). These two phrases tell us that the Son was fully human and very Jewish.

Jesus was truly and fully human, fully participating in every aspect of the human condition, except sin. He got tired and hungry. He ate and drank. He lived and died. He was a man.

And he was a Jewish man, “born under the law.” He was circumcised on the eighth day (Lk. 2:21), grew up reading the Torah, went to the temple with his family (Lk. 2:41ff), and faithfully followed all the demands of the law.

Verse 4 is saying that the eternal Son of God supernaturally became a Jewish man. This is high Christology, revealing the “mystery and wonder of God made flesh.”

Redemption for Adoption

Verse 5 moves from Christology to soteriology, or the doctrine of how God saves his people. It says that the Son became a man in order to redeem his people and make them sons. The Son came to make us sons.

The way he did this was by redemption and adoption, or adoption through redemption. In Exodus, God redeemed his people from slavery through the blood of the spotless lamb. In Christ, God redeems his people from slavery through the blood of the spotless Lamb of God. Jesus paid the price needed for our freedom. We’re under the curse of the law but Jesus takes our curse for us, redeeming us from the curse by his blood (3:10-13).

But that’s not all he did. He didn’t set us free and then just turn us loose in the wilderness. Just as Israel was freed from Egypt so that they could meet God at Sinai, in Christ God redeems us and then brings us to himself. This is called adoption (v. 5b).

1. I. Packer, in his book Knowing God, says that justification (i.e. forgiveness of sins) is the primary blessing of the gospel, but adoption is the highest blessing of the gospel. He says adoption is higher because it does something justification doesn’t do. Justification makes us right, but adoption brings us home.[5]

When you go home for the holidays, what do you most look forward to? Do you most look forward to visiting the house your family lives in or being with your family who lives in the house?

Justification is the house of salvation and it’s necessary. Without it, we’d be lost out in the cold. But adoption describes the relationship inside the house. Adoption is what makes going home worth it. God saves us in order to bring us home.

Our Status

This brings us to our status in verses 6-7. In Christ, God makes slaves his sons. Sonship is the goal of salvation. The evidence of our adoption is that we know God as “Father,” not miracles or tongues or visions or a cleaned-up life. The adopted ones know that, as Packer says, “‘Father’ is the Christian name for God.”[6]

But knowing God as Father can be painful for some. Some grow up with an abusive father, some an absent father – whether physically absent or emotionally absent (“there but not there”). Research shows that a physically present but emotionally absent parent is more damaging to a child than a physically absent parent. Growing up with an abusive or absent father makes it hard to understand the goodness of God the Father.

If this is you, you’re not alone. There’s help and healing in Jesus’ name and through his word and his church. In her book Finding My Father: How the Gospel Heals the Pain of Fatherlessness, Blair Linne describes what it’s like to grow up fatherless:

“Growing up without a father is like this. We see the effects of not having our dad – the gash, the tears, the steady dribble of heartache inside of us; the slow, creeping onset of pain and grief as the breach of relationship begins to boil over into different areas of our life.”[7]

Then she talks about how the fatherless typically handle this “breach of relationship”:

“What most of us never do is to work our way back to find the original cause. Quickly bandaging the cut and moving on seems easiest. So we put on our ‘I’m ok’ face and keep Pandora’s box sealed for fear of what may escape.”[8]

She talks about how, when she was 18, she finally talked to her dad about how his absence and silence was hurting her and what she wanted from him. To her surprise, he listened patiently and admitted that he was afraid and talked about how his dad hadn’t been in his life and how he was just repeating the cycle.

When she was 22, the grace of God overwhelmed her life and she finally saw the goodness of her heavenly Father. She realized that her earthly father couldn’t be all she needed or make up for all she lacked, and she learned to rest in God’s fatherly delight of her. She says, “For those of us who struggle with fatherlessness, we can trust God and know that he withheld our fathers so that we would come to know, love, and appreciate God himself in ways we otherwise would not have.”[9] Her story resonates deeply with mine. What about you?

Do you struggle with fatherlessness? If you’ve trusted in Jesus, you’re given a new Father who’s nothing like your earthly father. In Christ, you enter the fullness of God’s fatherly care and love and wisdom and protection and provision and delight. Through Christ, you can come to God and, as Linne says, “Unpack your bags and make yourself at home.”[10]

The Good News of Sonship

The goal of the gospel is sonship. Because of God’s advent, we can move from slavery to salvation to sonship. The Son came to make us sons.

As I’ve been preaching, you may be thinking, “Why doesn’t it say that God makes us ‘sons and daughters’? Aren’t ladies adopted in Christ too?

Yes of course! In Christ, “there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). Anyone who puts their faith in Jesus, male or female, is adopted into God’s family.

So why doesn’t Paul mention daughters? Those reading Paul’s letters for the first time would’ve understood that, in those days, a father’s inheritance went to his firstborn son, not his daughters. Daughters would receive their inheritance through their husbands.

So when Paul says that “we” receive “adoption as sons,” he means that everyone in Christ, man or woman, inherits whatever belongs to Christ (v. 7). The riches of Christ are for all his children. We’re all like the firstborn son who receives everything from their father.[11]

The doctrine of adoption is why Christians have been on the front lines of orphan care for two thousand years. Understanding our adoption in Christ propels us into the messy work of caring for the fatherless and motherless. We aren’t called to do everything, but we are all called to do something. What can you do to care for the orphan?

No One is Born into God’s Family

The good news of Christmas is that God sent his Son so that slaves like us can become sons and heirs of his glory.

We tend to think we’re born into God’s family, but we’re not. We have to be reborn into God’s family. Everyone who turns away from their sin and turns to Jesus is rescued out of their slavery and adopted into the family of God.

Those who repent and believe in Christ have a new family full of brothers and sisters in a local church. It’s an imperfect family, but it’s where we find acceptance and belonging and protection and provision and shepherding and discipleship. It’s where we grow into the men and women our Father made us to be.

Are you a son of God? Do you know God as Father? Are you a son or a slave? If you’re in Christ, the Son has made you a son.

This can be so hard to believe. The echo chamber of our fallen psyche and the unseen rebel angels around us want us to believe that God doesn’t really love us or know us or care about us, that these aren’t really our brothers and sisters, that we’re really orphans with no place to belong and no one who loves us.

Our Future Adoption

As we battle these thoughts and voices, we remember that our adoption isn’t just a past event but also a future one. Paul writes, “We wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23). Our adoption is about a new identity and a new future. As Russell Moore says, “Our adoption is about the day when the graves of this planet will be emptied, when the great assembly of Christ’s church will be gathered before the judgment seat.”[12]

On that day, the forces of darkness may once more accuse us of all we’ve done, but our hope and victory will come when the same voice that thundered over the Jordan at Jesus’ baptism will say, “These are my beloved children in whom I delight.”

The voice of evil will be forever silenced and we’ll be ushered into our father’s house where we’ll find the warmth and love and joy and relief that we’re so desperate for, a house where fatherlessness will be no more, a house full of former slaves who became sons because of the Son.

Will you be in that house? Do you want to live in that house with the Father? God sent his Son so that you could.

[1]Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 327.

[2]Ibid., 327-8, n. 17.

[3]Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 27.

[4]Timothy George, Galatians, The New American Commentary, vol. 30 (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 1994), 302.

[5]J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 186-8.

[6]Ibid., 182.

[7]Blair Linne, with Shai Linne, Finding My Father: How the Gospel Heals the Pain of Fatherlessness (The Good Book Company, 2021), 48.

[8]Ibid.

[9]Ibid., 56.

[10]Ibid., 59.

[11]Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 47-8.

[12]Ibid., 57.