To give a human example, brothers: even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise.

Galatians 3:15-18 ESV

After leading 318 of his own servants against the army of Chedorlaomer and three other kings in order rescue his nephew, Yahweh spoke to Abram, saying, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” No doubt this was a tremendous encouragement to the weary, old man, but the death upon the battlefield that he had just seen likely forced a particular element of God’s previous promise out of his mouth. “O Lord Yahweh,” Abram replied, “what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus? Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” You can almost hear the exhaustion in his voice.

But the LORD told Abram that He would indeed give him a son. Moreover, Yahweh took Abram outside and told him to number the stars. “So shall your offspring be.” Even though Abram believed Yahweh, which was counted to him as righteousness, God formalized His promise by making a covenant with the patriarch. He commanded Abram to cut some animals in half, and God’s presence displayed through fire and smoke passed between the pieces of the animals. In doing this, Sproul notes that God was essentially saying to Abram:

Abraham, because you want to know for sure that I will keep my promise to you, I’m going to pass between the animal pieces. By doing that, I’m saying that if I fail to keep my promise, I will be cut in half, just like these animals that you see. I’m swearing by Myself. What I’m saying, Abraham, if I don’t keep my word, may My immutability become mutated, My immortality become mortal, My eternality become temporal, My omnipotence become impotence, My omniscience become ignorance.”

In other words, God’s promise is as trustworthy and immovable as His very being. This was good news to Abraham, and as Paul argues in our present text, it is also good news for us.

A HUMAN EXAMPLE // VERSE 15

The false teaching that the Galatians were being swayed toward receiving emphasized the necessity for Gentile Christians to observe the ceremonial law, especially circumcision. These false teachers, the Judaizers, were very likely teachings that Gentiles certainly needed to trust in Christ for salvation, but they also needed to become sons of Abraham through circumcision. Even though Christ was not being blatantly rejected, Paul called this teaching a false gospel because it made works of the law a part of our justification before God, which is only through faith. To further drive his point home, Paul has spent much of this third chapter arguing that rather than secure their place in the blessing of Abraham, their reliance upon works actually places them against Abraham, who was justified through his faith. Indeed, any reliance on the law places one under the curse of the law, which we have been delivered from through Christ’s becoming a curse for us. Thus, Paul concluded our previous passage, saying, “so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”

Now we continue: To give a human example, brothers… Pause. We already made this point back in 1:11, but it is worth noticing again. Even though the Galatians were in danger of abandoning the gospel, they had not done so yet, so the apostle still called them his brothers. Again, if they were lost causes, he would not have wasted his time with writing them this very letter. No, all the sharp words that Paul uses were intended as a kind of fatherly discipline keep them away from the highway that they were running toward.

By saying to give a human example, Paul is introducing an earthly analogy that will help to describe the spiritual reality. Even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. David DeSilva notes that ὅμως (translated here as even) “may indicate at the outset some awareness of, and embarrassment at, the imperfections inherent in the argument from analogy that it introduces” (65). In other words, he knows that a human analogy cannot perfectly capture the fullness of the reality that he is attempting to convey, but nevertheless the analogy help to make our understanding clearer.

When considering this analogy, the most obvious question is simply what kind of man-made covenant was Paul talking about? Indeed, many agreements, both today and in the ancient world, could be changed or abolished even after being ratified. Ryken argues that Paul has a last will and testament in mind here, which is ratified on death and can no longer be changed. Perhaps so. The word διαθήκη could mean either covenant or last will and testament. Indeed, because we have two separate words in English, those are very separate items in our mind. Because Greek had a single word for both concepts, they likely saw them as different kinds of the same thing. In their mind, a will may have been considered a particular kind of covenant.

Hebrews 9:16-17 takes full advantage of the word’s multiple senses.

For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive.

Although the author of Hebrews was chiefly speaking about a covenant in our regular, biblical understanding of the word, he speaks about our “eternal inheritance” in verse 15, which seems to launch him into verses 16-17. In those two verses, the writer seems to be capitalizing on διαθήκη being able to mean both covenant and a will. That should come as a surprise since the author used οἴκος in the same manner in 3:1-6, capitalizing on its ability to refer either to a household or a house itself. The fact that Paul will speak about our inheritance in verse 18 makes me think that he has at least some notion of a will in mind.

Indeed, there is a writing from Lucian (125-180 AD) about a hypothetical case in which father is attempting to disown his son a second time. One of his arguments is that an adopted son could not be disinherited because the father freely chose to make him an heir, and a biological son who had been disowned once and reinstated is essentially functioning now like an adopted son. If this was common Greco-Roman practice, then it may certainly have factored into what Paul thought of our adoption to the Father through Christ.

Either way, Paul’s argument is from the lesser to the greater. If even some man-made covenants cannot be annulled or changed once they are ratified, how much less a covenant that God has made! That is Paul’s point. If we who are prone to falsehood are often legally required to keep commitments that we have made, will not the One who is Truth keep His Word? Sproul hit the nail on the head. For God to break His covenant would be for God to cease being God.

WHO IS CHRIST // VERSE 16

Now Paul sets out explain the recipients of God’s covenant promises to Abraham: Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to your offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.

Here Paul notes that God’s promise was not given to Abraham alone but also to his offspring. Of course, that is precisely why the Jews took great pride in being descendants of Abraham, for it meant that they were inheritors of his blessing and promise. They were Abraham’s offspring. Now especially in Genesis 15 whenever God told Abram to number the stars and then said, “so shall your offspring be,” we know that offspring was being used as a collective noun. A collective noun is a singular word that refers to multiple things. Family is a good example.

Paul obviously is not denying that grammatical reality, but he is taking advantage of the fact that the word is singular, which leads him to make the argument that Christ is the true offspring of Abraham. Ryken notes:

Once we understand that god’s promise to Abraham is a promise to Christ, then the fact that the word “offspring” is a collective noun makes perfect sense. A collective noun can refer to either a single individual, or to a group of individuals, or to both. So it is with the offspring of Abraham. The promise refers first of all to a single individual, Jesus Christ. But it also refers to a collection of individuals, namely, everyone who belongs to Christ. The party of the covenant is Christ and all who are in him. God gave the promise to Abraham. The promise was Christ. Since we are in Christ, the promise is for us. (124)

As with Galatians 2:20, Paul is again bringing us to the beauty of our union with Christ. Jesus is Abraham’s seed and offspring, and we are too in Him. Christ did not simply take the curse of our sins away; He also grafts us into Himself, meaning that all He has is now ours.

THIS IS WHAT I MEAN // VERSE 17

Having made an argument as to the unbreakable nature of God’s covenantal promises in verse 15 and of its recipient in verse 16, the apostle intends to connect the logical dots that we should have already put together: This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.

Here Paul notes the significance of the law being delivered to the Israelites after the time of Abraham. Moses delivered God’s law to Israel 430 years after Abraham. As monumental and significant as that covenant from Sinai was, it did not change or nullify God’s promise to Abraham.

Again, this was the human analogy that Paul made in verse 15. If there are human covenants that cannot be altered or repealed after they are ratified, how much less God’s promises! Indeed, that was the point of God passing through the two halves of the animals. His promise to Abraham was always guaranteed because God cannot lie.

Instead, God passed through the animals for both Abraham’s benefit and for ours. He was declaring exactly what Sproul said earlier. If God were to break His promise to Abraham, He would fail to be who He is, and both Abraham and us would have a far grander problem. Reality itself would unravel. Indeed, Jesus was not using a mere rhetorical flourish whenever He said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word will not pass away” (Mark 13:31). Because the cosmos was formed by His words, it should not surprise us to learn that they are more enduring than the cosmos itself.

Interestingly, Paul uses the perfect tense both to say that God’s covenant with Abraham was previously ratified and that the law came afterward. This indicates that both God’s promise to Abraham and the law at Sinai have continuous effects following their establishment. I think this anticipates Paul’s question in verse 19 about why God gave the law at all. The law was given with good purpose and was itself a form of God’s grace to His people. Yet Paul wants us to clearly see that the law came along beside the promise, but it did not change or nullify it in any way.

BY A PROMISE // VERSE 18

In the structure of Paul’s argument, verses 15-17 are the premises; verse 18 is the conclusion built upon those premises. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Again, the fact that Paul now speaks of the inheritance suggests the notion of a will, which serves particularly to administer a person’s inheritance to his or her descendants.

But what is the inheritance that Paul has in mind? Verse 14 seems to be the answer. It is the blessing of Abraham and the promise of the Spirit. John Eadie notes that God’s promise to Abraham was largely centered around the land of Canaan. But the author of Hebrews says that Abraham and those who are sojourners on earth as he did “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:15). Indeed, that is what Paul seems to be referring to in Ephesians 1:13 whenever he calls the Holy Spirit the guarantee of our inheritance that is still to come. We are all still awaiting the heavenly Promised Land.

First, the apostle places the law and the promise as being mutually exclusive means for receiving the inheritance. Of course, we might note that it is the law that actually enforces a covenant or a will, but that is obviously not what Paul is speaking about here. In saying by the law he clearly means by works of the law, which has been his discussion since 2:16. No one earns an inheritance through compliance to laws and regulations; rather, it comes simply through a promise, typically from a parent to their children. As Ryken comments:

A beneficiary receives an inheritance on the basis of a binding legal promise. Therefore, if God has promised an inheritance, it must come by way of promise, and not by works of the law. This brings us back to the point Paul has been trying to make all through this letter, the point recovering Pharisees keep needing to hear: God deals with us according to his promise, and not according to our performance. (127)

Of course, that is the good news of the gospel that was even proclaimed to Abraham beforehand. As Paul concludes even Abraham received the divine inheritance from God by promise. Although the patriarch displayed his faith through his obedience to the Word of Yahweh, God’s promise came to Abraham apart from his good works. He was justified simply by believing God, meaning that he was justified through faith. But all that Abraham received was purely of God’s grace. By saying, but God gave [the inheritance] to Abraham by a promise. Paul is literally saying that God graced [κεχάρισται] it to him. This again is in the perfect tense and, as F. F. Bruce notes, “implies that God not only granted the inheritance to Abraham in the past but continues to make it good to his descendants. The promise to Abraham was entirely a covenant of grant.”

One intended implication of this argument is the sheer audacity of any who place their confidence in their own good works to make them righteous. To do so, one must necessarily declare themselves to be greater than Abraham, which is a claim that neither Moses nor David nor any of the apostles would have made for themselves.

But since the blessing of Abraham comes to us through Christ, here then is our comfort:

The inheritance of eternal life is as surely yours as it was Abraham’s when he believed. For thou art partaker of the same promise with him. And when God gave him life, he gave you also life in him.

Indeed, that is the supreme beauty of the gospel being a promise. Forsake all thought of earning God’s favor and blessing. Instead, simply receive it as a son receives an inheritance from his father. It is a gift to be received, not a prize to be earned. As one hymn correctly says,

Let not conscience make you linger,
nor of fitness fondly dream;
all the fitness He requireth
is to feel your need of Him.

In coming to the Lord’s Supper this morning, let us feel our need of Christ and cling to His promise. Through the broken body and poured out blood of our Lord, the promise of God’s blessing and smiling favor have now come to us. Let us, therefore, taste and see the goodness of God in this tangible sign of our Savior’s redeeming love for us.