Ver. 2. Under tutors and governors.—Controllers of his person and property.
Ver. 3. Under the elements of the world.—The rudimentary religious teaching of a nonreligious character. The elementary lessons of outward things.
Ver. 4. God sent forth His Son.—Sent forth out of heaven from Himself. Implies the pre-existence of the Son. Made of a woman.—Made to be born of a woman. Indicating a special interposition of God in His birth as man. Made under the law.—By His Father’s appointment and His own free will, subject to the law, to keep it all, ceremonial and moral, for us, as the Representative Man, and to suffer and exhaust the full penalty of our violation of it.
Ver. 5. The adoption of sons.—Receive as something destined or due. Herein God makes of sons of men sons of God, inasmuch as God made of the Son of God the Son of man (Augustine).
Ver. 6. Abba, Father.—Abba is the Chaldee for father. The early use of it illustrates what Paul has been saying (ch. iii. 28) of the unity resulting from the Gospel; for Abba, Father, unites Hebrew and Greek on one lip, making the petitioner at once a Jew and a Gentile.
Ver. 9. How turn ye again [anew]?—Making a new beginning in religion, lapsing from Christianity just in as far as they embrace legalism. To the weak and beggarly elements.—Weak is contrasted with power as to effects, and beggarly with affluence in respect of gifts. The disparaging expression is applied; not to the ritualistic externalism of heathen religions, but rather to that God-given system of ritualistic ordinances which had served the Church in her infancy. That which was appropriate food for a babe or sick man is feeble and poor for a grown man in full health.
Ver. 12. Be as I am, for I am as ye are.—Paul had become as a Gentile, though he was once a passionate Jew. Their natural leanings towards Judaism they ought to sacrifice as well as he.
Ver. 13. Ye know how through infirmity of flesh I preached.—The weakness may have been general debility, resulting from great anxieties and toils. It has been supposed that Paul was feeble-eyed, or blear-eyed (Acts xxii. 6), and that this special weakness had been aggravated at the time now in question.
Ver. 17. They zealously affect you, but not well.—They keenly court you, but not honourably. They would exclude you—from everything and every one whose influence would tend to bring the Galatians back to loyalty to the Gospel.
Ver. 20. I desire to be present with you, and to change my voice.—To speak not with the stern tones of warning, but with tender entreaties. I stand in doubt of you.—I am sorely perplexed, nonplussed, bewildered, as if not knowing how to proceed.