From Servant to Son

Paul usually began his letters by thanking God for the people reading them. This time the news from Galatia made him want to shout.

He had walked those hill towns himself: Iconium, Lystra, Derbe. Farmers and shopkeepers there had believed in Jesus and welcomed Paul like an angel from God. Now some teachers had come behind him with a different message.

"You are not really in God's family yet," the teachers said. "First you must take the mark God gave Abraham's family. Keep all of Moses' laws. Eat the right foods and keep the right holy days. Then God will count you as his own."

Some of the believers in Galatia began keeping the special days. Had they been doing it wrong all along?

"Write this down," Paul told the friend holding the pen. "You foolish Galatians! Who has put a spell on you?"

(When a line like that is read out in church, everybody sits up straight.)

"Think of a rich man's son," Paul went on, more calmly. "One day the farm will be his. The house, the fields, every sheep. But while he is a child, he is no different from a servant. Guardians and managers tell him what to do, right up to the day his father has set."

(He owns the orchard, and he still has to ask before he picks an apple.)

"That is how we were," Paul said. "Like children, kept under rules, waiting. But when the right time had fully come, God sent his Son. Born of a woman. Born under the law. He came to buy back the people who were under the law, so that we could be adopted as God's own children."

To buy someone back is to pay the price that sets him free. To be adopted is to be brought into a family on purpose and given its name. (Paul wrote "sons," because in those days the sons got the inheritance. In God's family the daughters get it too.)

Then Paul's voice went soft.

"And because you are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, and the Spirit calls out, 'Abba! Father!'"

Abba was the word a child called his dad in the language Jesus spoke. It is the word a girl yells across the yard when she wants to be swung up high.

"So you are not a servant anymore," Paul said. "You are a son. And if you are a son, God has made you an heir."
Near the end of the letter, Paul took the pen himself. "See what big letters I make, writing to you with my own hand!" Off it went along the dusty roads, to be read aloud in house after house.

A servant cannot work his way into being a son. He can keep every rule and still be a servant. Only the father can make someone his child.

God gave Abraham the promise long before he gave Moses the law. Then the law watched over God's people like a guardian over a child, until the day the Father had set. When it came, a baby was born of a woman, under the law, and he kept every line of it. He was the one Son who never needed adopting. "Abba" was his own word for God, right up to his last night. Then he died on a cross, paying the price that buys servants back.

On the third day he rose, and he told Mary he was going to "my Father and your Father." All over Galatia, people who once bowed to stone gods were calling God by Jesus' own word for him. Abba. Father. The family was growing, and it still is.