These Are the Sons of Abraham

April 4, 2014

After reminding the Galatians how they received the Spirit—through the message of “faith”—Paul goes on to say that just as Abraham believed God’s promise, and that was accounted to him as righteousness, so too those “from faith” are the “sons of Abraham.”

The logic of this is not immediately obvious, particularly if we simply take “faith” to refer simply and only to our believing. Why should my believing like Abraham make me his “son”?

It seems to me that there are several angles here. First is that “message of faith” is an echo of Isaiah 53:1 (“Who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm—i.e. God’s power, and thus His Spirit—been revealed?”). That “report” or “message” in context is that of the suffering Servant, just as Paul has opened this section with a reference to the placarding of Jesus as the Messiah precisely as the crucified one (Gal 3:1).

That in turn pulls in 2:20, where “the faith of the Son of God” is described in terms of a love that “gave Himself up for me.” Thus faith is both my trust in God’s promise, but more particularly, God’s own embodiment and enactment of that promise in the faithful act of His Messiah upon the cross.

That eschatological message provides the groundwork, but we are still not all the way there to sonship to Abraham. To get there, we have to understand that when Paul says Abraham’s trust in the promise was counted to him as righteousness, the upshot is that this is the right covenantal response which God would recognize and vindicate. But Abraham, both by Paul’s own presuppositions and those of his opponents, is the father of the covenant, so when God vindicates the covenantal response of the Galatians (as He has done, according to the description in 3:1–5), that proves they are in fact Abraham’s sons. To be vindicated within the covenant is to be vindicated as Abraham’s children.