Galatians 5:1

Galatians 5:1. For freedom did Christ make (or set) us free: stand firm, therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage. [1] This exhortation is the inferential close of the argumentative, and a suitable beginning of the hortative, part of the Epistle. Some editors and commentators put the verse, either in whole or in part, at the end of chap. 4. Paul contrasts Christian freedom with Jewish bondage, and urges the Galatians to hold fast to the former, and not to relapse into the latter, or to exchange one form of slavery (their native heathenism) with another (Judaism). Hence ‘again.' ‘Freedom' is the outcome of the preceding discussion, and is emphatically put first ‘For, or ‘unto freedom' (better than ‘ with freedom,' although the Greek admits both), i.e., in order that we might be and remain free. It is, of course, not carnal but spiritual freedom, freedom from the curse and bondage of the law, secured to the believer as a permanent condition by the vicarious death of Christ, which satisfied the demands of Divine justice and saved us from wrath. This freedom implies the consciousness of the full pardon of our sins, a ready and direct access to the throne of grace, and all the privileges and responsibilities of a son in his father's house. A Christian freeman is a grateful and cheerful servant of God, and a lord and king, though in chains, like Paul in Rome, who was a true freeman, while Nero on the throne was a miserable slave of his lusts. ‘Stand firm,' in this liberty of an evangelical Christian. ‘Yoke of bondage,' which bears down the neck and prevents free motion. Legalism is a burdensome slavery of the mind and conscience. Peter, in his speech at the Council of Jerusalem, likewise calls the law of Moses a ‘yoke,' which ‘neither our fathers nor we could bear,' Acts 15:10. Luther remarks on this verse: ‘Let us learn to count this our freedom most noble, exalted, and precious, which no emperor, no prophet, nor patriarch, no angel from heaven, but Christ, God's Son, hath obtained for us; not for this that He might relieve us from a bodily and temporal subjection, but from a spiritual and eternal imprisonment of the cruelest tyrants, namely, the law, sin, death, devil.' Calvin: ‘Paul reminds them that they ought not to despise a freedom so precious. And certainly it is an invaluable blessing, in defence of which it is our duty to fight even to death. If men lay upon our shoulders an unjust burden, it may be borne; but if they endeavor to bring our conscience into bondage , we must resist valiantly, even to death.'

[1] This is upon the whole the best reading (adopted by Dense), Lachmann, Tischendorf, Exodus 8, Meyer). The MSS. and versions vary considerably, although the sense is not essentially altered. The received text reads literally: ‘Stand firm therefore in (or, in respect to) the freedom with which (or, for which) Christ made us free, and be not,' etc. (τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ οὖν, ᾗ Χριστὸς ἡμᾶς ἠλευθέρωσε, στήκετε). But the oldest MSS. (א B, etc.) put ‘therefore' (οὖν) after ‘stand' (στήκετε), and omit ‘with which' (ᾗ). The punctuation is a matter of interpretation.