Who gets the Inheritance? (Galatians 3:15-22)

We can all imagine a situation in which the children of a deceased parent are gathered in a room to discover their share of the inheritance. They may have different reasons for wanting their share and they might be pleased with what they receive or they might be disappointed. Yet they cannot change the terms that were stipulated beforehand.

Or we may have known about families where the parents informed the children beforehand about their share in the inheritance, but then they added certain conditions to it that if ignored or adjusted would deprive their children of the promised inheritance.

Another possible situation occurs when the children are not mature enough to be given their inheritance and so the parents will have identified suitable people to guide and look after them until they are old enough to appreciate their inheritance. 

Although this imaginary set of circumstances seems far away from a church service, it is what this passage in Galatians is about. The question is, who gets the spiritual inheritance that Paul is concerned with here?

A word of encouragement

How we describe a person indicates what is going to said about them. If we call a person ‘a wife’, others can assume that we will speak about her married status. Or if we describe her as a mother, people will assume we will speak about her children. Here Paul calls his readers by the title ‘brothers’ which indicates he wants them to recall that they and he belong to God’s family and that he will be referring to issues that mark or affect them as God’s children.

Abraham or Moses

Paul is explaining to the Galatians why the gospel is greater than the law. The first point that he mentions is that the gospel is connected to a covenant that is older than the covenant made with Moses. Of course, one could argue that the subsequent covenant had replaced the earlier one, and that is probably what the false teachers were saying. So what does Paul say about the older covenant, the one made with Abraham?

The apostle mentions three details. First, he says that even among humans a ratified covenant cannot be replaced or adjusted because that would be unjust; since that is the case, it will not happen with God. Second, he tells the Galatians to note what the covenant with Abraham was about – it involved divine promises about an inheritance. The inheritance involved the land promised to Abraham. Third, the promises were made to the seed of Abraham. Paul stresses that since the word ‘seed’ is singular it can refer to a specific descendant, and that descendant is the Messiah. 

The implication of this is that it is impossible for believers to receive the blessing of the inheritance by their adherence to the ceremonial law. Paul saying this indicates that the false teachers were saying that obedience to the ceremonial law was necessary in order to receive any of God’s blessings. Yet the only way to receive the inheritance was by the fulfilment of a divine promise. The outlook of the false teachers required God to move away from his promises to Abraham.

Why was the law given?

Paul deals with the obvious rejoinder that would be given by those who advocated obedience to the law. They could accuse Paul of teaching that the giving of the law was pointless. We must bear in mind that Paul here is not describing every use of the law. Instead, he is dealing with a specific wrong use of the law by the false teachers when they said that Gentile believers should practice certain aspects of the ceremonial law, such as circumcision.

Paul informs his readers of three reasons that indicate he did not think the giving of the law was pointless. First, it was given because the Israelites were sinners; he probably means that they needed the details of the law to enable them to identify wrong practices and to keep them from engaging in wrong practices. Through the law, they would discover what their sins were. Although it might not seem like it initially, this feature of the law was a blessing. 

Second, Paul said that the form in which the law was given was temporary – once the promised Seed of Abraham had come, there would be no need of a system of law to keep them living correctly. This implies that the Messiah would do something that would result in the Mosaic law being no longer necessary, at least as far as acceptance with God is concerned. 

Third, when God gave the law he used creatures to do so, here said to be the angels and the intermediary, who was Moses. In saying this, Paul is affirming that the giving of the law was an august occasion – it was the same God who gave both the promise to Abraham and the law through Moses – this is probably what Paul means when he says that God is one. Yet in contrast to the promise given to Abraham the manner of giving the law through Moses was inferior. God gave the promise direct to Abraham and his offspring whereas when he gave the law he did not give it direct but through chosen creatures.

Are the law and promise in opposition?

It would be easy to assume from Paul’s words that the law and the promise were in opposition to one another. In fact, in the way that the false teachers used the law, that was the outcome. Their teaching requiring Gentile converts to adopt the ceremonial law put the law in the wrong place and put the law to a wrong use.

Paul deals with this issue in two ways. He suggests a possibility and he then describes a reality. The possibility is to consider if any obedience to any law by sinful people would produce perfect righteousness. If an easier law had been given, would that have resulted in perfect behaviour? The answer is always no because the persons trying to keep it could never do so perfectly. Their attempts at obedience could not be described as righteousness, which is a devastating assessment of what the teaching of the false teachers produced.

The reality described by Paul is that those who lived in the period between the giving of the law and the coming of Christ were like people who are in a place of confinement, guided by soldiers. Paul shortly will use other illustrations to describe the spiritual lifestyle during that period. For example, he will say that living under the law is like young children living under the guidance of tutors who have to use various means to keep the children in place. But here he says that life during the period of the law was constrained, except the soldiers were not humans but the various laws God had specified. Nobody in a prison is in a situation in which he or she can enjoy an inheritance. 

Yet there is good news for those so confined. Although they were sinners, they had not been put in a prison without hope. Instead they should have looked at the laws and deduced, ‘They are signs that the Messiah is coming.’ Here is a way of looking at this that may help us. (1) When God gave his promise to Abraham, most of the world was in spiritual darkness. (2) God gave a promise to Abraham that there would be a Messiah who would bring his people into their inheritance. (3) He then separated Israel from the other nations and gave to Israel special protections designed to keep them from living sinfully – he did not give those special protections to the nations. (4) These protections would be unnecessary after the Messiah came, so there was no need for the false teachers to try and enforce them.

How is liberty obtained?

The liberty that is needed is a right to the inheritance which would be given to suitable people in fulfilment of God’s promise. Who are the suitable people that can have this inheritance? Paul’s answer is that they are those who have faith in Christ Jesus. This fact causes us to think about faith carefully because it is obvious that the Galatians got it wrong when they listened to the false teachers. They decided that faith in Jesus was not sufficient whereas Paul says that it is.

There are many ways of describing faith in Jesus. Here are some features of such faith. First, it is a response to the gospel. Faith in Jesus is based on what a person is told concerning what Jesus did for sinners. Someone describes what Jesus did in his life, death and resurrection, and listeners respond to the message. 

Second, the response is from the heart. We could say that this aspect of the response is also connected to the message, but it is a move on from understanding intellectually the work of Christ. A sinner seeking salvation embraces Jesus or receives Jesus. Obviously, there will be a sense of gratitude and love for Jesus. But the main aspect is that the individual depends on Jesus to be his or her Saviour.

Third, the heart response comes from an individual distressed because of personal sin. The individual responding to the gospel knows that he is guilty of numerous sins against God. He now knows that he is a sinner who does not deserve to be pardoned. He is ashamed of the sins that caused Jesus to suffer on the cross.

Fourth, when they exercise this faith, they discover that they now possess the promise of the inheritance. Whatever their status in this world, their highest status is now the fact that they are heirs of an eternal inheritance. They find in their hearts a longing for this inheritance, and a longing that will increase the closer they get to it.

What is the inheritance?

The first detail about the inheritance is that it is initially Christ’s inheritance. After all, he is the seed of Abraham to whom the promises were made. It is because believers are in Christ after they believe that they will share his inheritance. They are now heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, as Paul says in Romans 8:17.

A second detail is that the inheritance is geographical – Abraham and his seed were promised a land. Paul says in Romans that Abraham saw beyond the confines of Canaan and realised that it was a picture of the world, the real inheritance (Rom. 4:13). Of course, it is not the world as it currently is because at present it is not fit to be the inheritance. But when the Heir returns, one of his activities will be to recreate the inheritance in the sense of making it perfect and a suitable location for him and his co-heirs. The inheritance is the new heavens and new earth.

A third detail is that the inheritance is about glory. It is difficult for us to understand what glory is because we have never seen true glory in a literal sense. From one point of view, it is perfection. We can also say that it is true beauty. And it is also high honour. The amazing reality of this is that those who will have this glorious inheritance were once sinners. But Jesus has won for his people the right to have this inheritance as theirs.

Application

As we think about the arguments of Paul in this section of Galatians we can see how he wants the Galatians to appreciate the simplicity of the gospel, which is that God’s people are marked by ongoing faith in Jesus as the Saviour. The other detail to focus on is that their place in the world to come is theirs because it was purchased by Jesus on the cross. There he paid the price that was required in order for all of them to have the promise of glory in the world to come.