- Occasioned by the defection of his converts.—“I stand in doubt of you.”
- As to what method he should adopt to restore them.—“And to change my voice.”
- Increased by the difficulty of effecting a personal interview.—“I desire to be present with you now.”
“I stand in doubt of you.” Doubtful Christians.
I. Persons whose religion is liable to suspicion.—1. Those who have long attended the means of grace, and are very defective in knowledge. 2. Who profess much knowledge and are puffed up with it. 3. Who contend for doctrinal religion rather than for that which is practical and experimental. 4. Who waver in their attachment to the fundamental principles of the Gospel. 5. Who neglect the ordinances of God’s house. 6. Who neglect devotional exercises. 7. Who co-operate not with the Church to advance the kingdom of Christ in the world.
II. The improvement to be made of the subject.—1. Should lead to self-examination. 2. Shows the loss and danger of persons so characterised. 3. Should lead to repentance and faith. 4. While exercising a godly jealousy over others, let Christians watch with greater jealousy over themselves.—Helps.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 21–31.
The History of Hagar and Sarah allegorical of the Law and the Gospel.
I. The two women represented two different covenants.—1. Hagar represented Sinai, typical of the law with its slavish exactions and terrible threatenings (vers. 22, 25). Sinai spoke of bondage and terror. It was a true symbol of the working of the law of Moses, exhibited in the present condition of Judaism. And round the base of Sinai Hagar’s wild sons had found their dwelling. Jerusalem was no longer the mother of freemen. Her sons chafed under the Roman yoke. They were loaded with self-inflicted burdens. The spirit of the nation was that of rebellious, discontented slaves. They were Ishmaelite sons of Abraham, with none of the nobleness, the reverence, the calm and elevated faith of their father. In the Judaism of the apostle’s day the Sinaitic dispensation, uncontrolled by the higher patriarchal and prophetic faith, had worked out its natural result. It gendered to bondage. A system of repression and routine, it had produced men punctual in tithes of mint and anise, but without justice, mercy, or faith; vaunting their liberty while they were servants of corruption. The Pharisee was the typical product of law apart from grace. Under the garb of a freeman he carried the soul of a slave.
2. Sarah represented Jerusalem, typical of the Gospel with its higher freedom and larger spiritual fruitfulness (vers. 26–28).—Paul has escaped from the prison of legalism, from the confines of Sinai; he has left behind the perishing earthly Jerusalem, and with it the bitterness and gloom of his Pharisaic days. He is a citizen of the heavenly Zion, breathing the air of a Divine freedom. The yoke is broken from the neck of the Church of God; the desolation is gone from her heart. Robbed of all outward means, mocked and thrust out as she is by Israel after the flesh, her rejection is a release, an emancipation. Conscious of the spirit of sonship and freedom, looking out on the boundless conquests lying before her in the Gentile world, the Church of the new covenant glories in her tribulations. In Paul is fulfilled the joy of prophet and psalmist, who sang in former days of gloom concerning Israel’s enlargement and world-wide victories (Findlay).
II. The antagonism of their descendants represented the violent and incessant opposition of the law to the Gospel.—“As he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. . . . Cast out the bondwoman and her son” (vers. 29, 30). Sooner or later the slave-boy was bound to go. He has no proper birthright, no permanent footing in the house. One day he exceeds his licence, he makes himself intolerable; he must be gone. The Israelitish people showed more than Ishmael’s jealousy toward the infant Church of the Spirit. No weapon of violence or calumny was too base to be used against it. Year by year they became more hardened against spiritual truth, more malignant towards Christianity, and more furious and fanatical in their hatred towards their civil rulers. Ishmael was in the way of Isaac’s safety and prosperity (Ibid.).
III. The Gospel bestows a richer inheritance than the law.—“The son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. . . . We are children of the free” (vers. 30, 31). The two systems were irreconcilable. The law and the Gospel cannot coexist and inherit together; the law must disappear before the Gospel. The higher absorbs the lower. The Church of the future, the spiritual seed of Abraham gathered out of all nations, has no part in legalism. It embraces blessings of which Mosaism had no conception—“an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away” (1 Pet. i. 4).