There will always be strong temptations to pull away from Christ and back to self-determining legalism, ritualism, and materialistic self-fulfillment. The Galatians, like Lot’s wife, were succumbing to this temptation [to look back]. Will we do the same?

“What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’”?

Though God redeemed Israel from four centuries of Egyptian slavery, at the cost of the blood of the spotless Passover Lamb, they immediately hankered for their old chains. Every fresh challenge provoked the same cry, “Take us back to Egypt, back to the whips and restless toil!”

Identically, no sooner had the Galatians found freedom by faith in Jesus Christ than they were tempted back to their old slavery.

The same potent pullback lurks within us too. Which is why we must hear Paul’s passionate exhortation to the Galatians:

Galatians 4:8–11

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.
⁹But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable elements? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?
¹⁰You are observing special days and months and seasons and years!
¹¹I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you.

You Were Slaves

Before they were Christians the Galatians “did not know God.” We will see exactly what this means in verse 9 but suffice at this point to say that “knowledge” speaks not of “knowing about” but of “knowing personally,” of relationship. Before faith in Christ the Galatians were not living coram Deo, in the presence of God in right relationship with him.

They were instead “slaves to those who by nature are not gods,” to useless nonentities.

The Roman Empire was built on a slave economy: an estimated one in three were enslaved in Rome itself. Some slaves toiled in salt mines or rowed in naval galleys until death by exhaustion. Other slaves worked in more humane conditions as domestics, teachers, nannies, or managers. What defined a slave was a person whose life and labour belonged to and was controlled by another. They could not do what they willed, but only what their master willed.

Though the Galatian Christians had been converted from various Jewish and heathen heritages they had all once been enslaved to certain “unreal gods.” Paul carefully chooses words that might describe any non-existent objects of awe and obedience. To what revered nonentities was the Galatians’ life and labour and will enslaved to?

The Slavery of Legalism

Read in the context of verse 9, which describes the Galatians returning to “the basic elements” of the law, to “special days and months and seasons and years,” we hear Paul speaking directly to converted Jews. They had been chained to the rituals of the Old Testament, to circumcision, food laws, and the festivals, to the “pedagogue” which led them to Christ but whose job was now complete.

They had been enslaved to the control of these things: “You must carefully and diligently keep these laws in order to be in the right with God!” Laws which “by nature are not gods,” which in fact have no power to restore us to a right relationship with God.

The Slavery of Ritualism

The sixteenth-century Reformers applied this teaching to legalistic ritual. Medieval Roman Catholicism demanded attendance at the mass, conducted in Latin, which no one could understand—often not even the priest himself. It demanded fasts, prayers to saints, payment of church taxes, and the purchase of indulgences: fraudulent certificates purporting to shorten a loved one’s time in the fires of purgatory.

The Reformers saw all this as a dreadful slavery: lives and wills chained to an empty and unscriptural system of rituals, antithetical to saving trust in Jesus Christ. These revered things were “by nature not gods.” They were powerless to restore people to a right relationship with God.

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