Hagar And Ishmael
Here is introduced, in remarkable contrast with the elevated, placid, and pensive life of Abraham, the pathetic story of Hagar, the willful and despairing bond-woman. And this is typical of the contrast between the dignity of faith “in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free,” and the slavery of legal bondage: “for this Hagar is mount Sinai” — “which gendereth to bondage." The outcome of this is the system of law, a carnal and conditional system of privileges, whose development is Jerusalem. Ishmael was the type of this subjection, this legal system of things. But Isaac was the type of a higher order of things in every direction: he came in the way (not of law and penal submission but) of promise and faith; and the development is the heavenly Jerusalem. Though Isaac was last in regard to time, he was first in regard to purpose: God promised him before Ishmael's birth, although Ishmael was here long before Isaac's advent. “For it is written, that Abraham had two sons; the one by a bond-maid, the other by a free-woman; but he who was of the bond-woman was born after the flesh; but he of the free-woman was by promise; which things are an allegory, for these [women] are the two covenants.” Ishmael represents those who are the “children” of the law-covenant—penal obedience and bondage; Isaac those of the covenant of faith—which worketh by love—and who stand in a “liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.”
Ishmael represents also a material and fleshly system of things, as Isaac a spiritual one. And “as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so now.” The apostle's reasoning is that Christians are children of the heavenly Jerusalem (Sarah), and that “we brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise,” and that we are to “cast out the bond-woman,” that is, have nothing to do with anything of legal bondage and penal obedience. The Galatians were becoming involved in these, and he, with passionate urgency, entreats them away from such “weak and beggarly elements.” These elements (or rudiments) were not weak and beggarly in themselves, but in contrast to the strength and opulence of the gospel; and now to turn back to them is to prefer the rudiment to the development, the shadow to the substance, or the skeleton to the body. It is to prefer the hard life of Ishmael to the princely dignity of Isaac; to choose the slave Hagar as a mother, rather than the wife and “princess” Sarah; to prefer condemnation to justification—Moses to Christ. All who take any ground of justification short of God's absolute grace—all who look to their own hearts as a ground of salvation, or fear their own demerits can prejudice the infinite efficacy of the work of Christ—all who turn to the law for righteousness before God, or as a guide of conduct, are by the apostle shown that they are electing to be sons of the slave Hagar rather than of the princess Sarah, to be citizens of the earthly Jerusalem rather than of the heavenly, in short Jews rather than Christians. The scripture is so complete that the Abrahamic portion they would turn to condemns them, and tells them to “cast out the bond-woman!”