The subject of the epistle: justification by grace; the impossibility of uniting the law and the gospel
The Epistle to the Galatians sets before us the great source of the afflictions and conflicts of the Apostle in the regions where he had preached the glad tidings; that which was at the same time the principal means employed by the enemy to corrupt the gospel. God, it is true, in His love, has suited the gospel to the wants of man. The enemy brings down that which still bears its name to the level of the haughty will of man and the corruption of the natural heart, turning Christianity into a religion that suits that heart, in place of one that is the expression of the heart of God-an all-holy God-and the revelation of that which He has done in His love to bring us into communion with His holiness. We see, at the same time, the connection between the Judaizing doctrine-which is the denial of full redemption, and looking for good in flesh and man’s will, power in man to work out righteousness in himself for God-in those who hindered the Apostle’s work, and the attacks that were constantly aimed against his ministry; because that ministry appealed directly to the power of the Holy Spirit and to the immediate authority of a glorified Christ, and set man as ruined, and Judaism which dealt with man, wholly aside. In withstanding the efforts of the Judaizers, the Apostle necessarily establishes the elementary principles of justification by grace. Traces both of this combat with the spirit of Judaism, by which Satan endeavored to destroy true Christianity, and of the maintenance by the Apostle of this liberty, and of the authority of his ministry, are found in a multitude of passages in Corinthians, in Philippians, in Colossians, in Timothy, and historically in the Acts. In Galatians the two subjects are treated in a direct and formal way. But the gospel is consequently reduced to its most simple elements, grace to its most simple expression. But, with regard to the error, the question is but the more decisively settled; the irreconcilable difference between the two principles, Judaism and the gospel, is the more strongly marked.
God allowed this invasion of His assembly in the earliest days of its existence, in order that we might have the answer of divine inspiration to these very principles, when they should be developed in an established system which would claim submission from the children of God as being the church that He had established and the only ministry that He acknowledged. The immediate source of true ministry, according to the gospel that Paul preached to the Gentiles, the impossibility of uniting the law and that gospel-of binding up together subjection to its ordinances and distinction of days-with the holy and heavenly liberty into which we are brought by a risen Christ, the impossibility, I repeat, of uniting the religion of the flesh with that of the Spirit, are plainly set forth in this epistle.