The apostolic benediction.
"Grace to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ." This benediction is a proof of the hearty love of the apostle, as well as a mark of his unswerving loyalty to the doctrine of salvation by Christ only.
I. THE BLESSINGS WISHED FOR. "Grace and peace." Nearly twenty times in Scripture are these two graces linked together, but never so significantly as at present, when the Galatians manifested a disposition to return to the Law with its terrors and disquietudes.
1. Grace is free, undeserved love manifesting itself in a free gift. (Romans 5:15.) It is the foundation of our redemption. It is also an operation of that free love in our hearts—grace, quickening, sanctifying, comforting, strengthening. It is the first blessing the apostle asks for; it is what we all need; it is but the beginning of blessings innumerable.
2. -Peace is not peace with God (Romans 5:1), but the peace that springs from it. The true order of blessing and experience is not peace and grace, but grace and peace. Grace is the root of peace; peace is the inner comfort that springs from grace. The apostle desires that the Galatians may not only share in Divine grace, but possess the assurance of it. Without peace, thousands are unhappy, and the desire of it causes many a pagan to bear labour and pain in the vain effort to enjoy it. The worldly man longs for peace without grace. But the two are inseparably linked. Without it there is no progress in religion, and no real test of the value of a man's religion. Luther says, "Grace releaseth sin, and peace maketh the conscience quiet. The two fiends that torment us are sin and conscience." Another says," If you have peace, you are rich without money; if you have it not, you are poor with millions."
II. THE SOURCE OF THESE BLESSINGS. "From God the Father, and from cur Lord Jesus Christ"—from God the Father as Fountain, and Jesus Christ as the Channel of conveyance to us. The highest blessings of the gospel, as well as the appointment to apostolic office, spring alike from Father and Son. They are here both associated as objects of Divine worship, and as the sources of spiritual blessing. This proves Christ's Deity. "The living fountain of grace which ever flowed and never ebbed in the bosom of our God has been gloriously opened to a thirsty world in the bleeding side of Christ."
The sum and substance of the Epistle.
He here declares the true ground of acceptance with God which the Galatians practically ignored by their system of legalism.
I. MARK THE SELF-OBLATION OF CHRIST. "Who gave himself for our sins." Our Redeemer was not killed by the hand of violence, though "by lawless hands" he was crucified and slain; he spontaneously offered himself, and his offering was not the impulse of mere excited feeling. The expression, "gave himself," always points to the free surrender of his life ([ Ti Galatians 2:6; Titus 1:14; Matthew 20:28). It accords with his own language, "I lay down my life of myself" (John 10:17); "How am I straitened till it be accomplished!" The Father is elsewhere described as providing the sacrifice, and delivering him up for us all (Romans 8:32), but the text describes his own priestly act in accordance "with the Father's will." It is needless to say that the phrase does not point to his incarnation, but to his death.
II. THE RELATION BETWEEN HIS DEATH AND OUR SINS. "Who gave himself for our sins." Some divines connect Christ's death, not with the pardon of sin, but with our deliverance from its power. They regard sin as a disease rather than as an offence, a calamity rather than a crime against God; they represent the difficulty as not on God's side, but on man's, so that forgiveness is sure to follow upon spiritual recovery. In other words, they place life first and pardon next, basing our acceptance, not upon Christ's death, but upon the possession of the Divine life. The Bible sense is that "his blood was shed for the remission of sins." The life is regarded as the effect or reward of the Crucifixion. There is a direct causal connection between Christ's death and the pardon of our sins. The reason why he gave himself is here assigned. Our sins were the procuring cause of his death. This is the plain teaching of Isaiah 53:5; Romans 4:25; 1 Corinthians 15:3; 1 Peter 3:18. Besides, it would be tautology for the apostle to refer here to mere human improvement, since the design of the sacrifice is to accomplish this very improvement, as we see by the terminating clause. It would be absurd to confound the means and the end, the cause with the effect.
III. THE ETHICAL RESULT OF THE SACRIFICE. "That he might deliver us from this present evil world." This shows the truly sanctifying result of Christ's death. This marks out the gospel as an instrument of emancipation from a state of bondage. It strikes the key-note of the Epistle. As the oblation is perfect, so the deliverance secured by it is perfect; there is, therefore, no compatibility between obedience to the Mosaic Law and faith in Jesus Christ. The deliverance is from "this present evil world;" not from the Jewish dispensation, which is nowhere called evil in itself, though it became so through a grave misapplication of its principles—besides, the Gentiles had not by Christianity been delivered from it; nor is it deliverance in the sense of an abandonment of our place and duty in the world; but it is the world as it is, without religion, under curse, transitory, corrupt, and doomed. It was deliverance from the corrupt course of this world which was under bondage to gods (2 Corinthians 4:4), from that world which was crucified to Paul and he to it (Galatians 6:14). It is deliverance from the power of that world which has its threefold seductiveness "in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life." Thus provision is made in the atonement for the sanctification as well as the justification of sinners. Christ is become to us "Sanctification" as well as "Righteousness."
IV. THE ORIGIN OF THE WHOLE WORK OF CHRIST. "By the will of God the Father." It was the Father's appointed work. It was an act of obedience on Christ's part to his Father's will. "For this cause came I into the world, that I might do the will of my Father." Christ's sacrifice was thus in no sense a human plan, nor dependent upon man's obedience; it was the effect of the commanded will of our Father wishing to win back his lost children. Therefore let us not attempt to overturn or neutralize the system of grace by our legal obedience.
V. THE DOXOLOGY. "To whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen."
1. The glory of salvation being due, not to man, but God, for its initiation, for its execution, for its bestowal, it becomes our duty to give him glory in all our worship and in all our duties (1 Corinthians 10:31).
2. The doxology is an implied reproof of the Galatians for attempting to divide the work of salvation between God and man.
3. The praises of the redeemed, though begun on earth, will continue through all eternity.