Galatians 4:24-25 Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which engenders to bondage, which is Agar.… There was a terrible severity in it meant to shock and exasperate his opponents; a withering contempt which we, with our feelings, can hardly comprehend. To make Hagar and Ishmael — the bondwoman and her slave child — a type of the Jew, and Sarah and Isaac of the Christian Gentiles, would seem to those pointed at by the parable as if a sacrilegious hand had torn down the vail of the temple, and exposed the holiest of all to the common gaze; or, rather, as if the unclean and uncircumcised had been introduced within the sacred precincts as their proper place, and the very priest of God thrust out. Consistently with this daring defiance of the national opinion, this contemptuous mocking of Jewish pretensions, put in the form of that allegorical logic in which St. Paul was so thorough a proficient, and the force of which on the Hebrew mind he knew so well, — in consistency with this, he even represents the believing Gentiles as the seed of Abraham; tells them that the blessing of Abraham comes on them; that theirs is the promise and the inheritance through faith; that circumcision is nothing, and may be worse than nothing; that "the Israel of God" is not now "the concision," but those who walk according to the rule that "neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature" (Philippians 3:2, 3). (T. Binney.) Parallel Verses KJV: Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. |
    |