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Scripture Reading: 1 Cor. 16:23-24; 2 Cor. 13:14; Gal. 3:1-3, 5, 8-14; 4:6; 22-23, 5:25; 6:8
Before we consider the Spirit in the book of Galatians, we will review the revelation of the Spirit in 1 and 2 Corinthians. At the conclusion of 1 Corinthians, Paul says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love in Christ Jesus be with you all” (16:23-24). At the end of 2 Corinthians, he again mentions grace and love, but he adds fellowship. Second Corinthians 13:14 is a significant verse. After everything Paul says in 1 and 2 Corinthians, he closes his writing by saying, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” All the books of the Bible were written in a very specific and meaningful way. No other book ends in the way 2 Corinthians does. Paul’s concluding word indicates that the transforming work spoken of in the two Epistles to the Corinthians requires the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
This verse speaks of three items: the grace of Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Spirit. Here we can see the Divine Trinity. God, Christ, and the Spirit are neither three alone nor one alone. Rather, They are three in one. In the same way, grace, love, and fellowship are three items in one. Love is inward, in the heart, so it needs to be expressed. For example, if a brother gives someone a Bible, his love is expressed by that gift. In this sense, the gift of the Bible is a grace to the recipient. While love is the inward source, grace is the outward expression. We may compare love and grace to an object with two ends. It is one object, but what is love on one end is grace on the other end. Love is in God the Father as the source, while grace is in God the Son as the expression. First John 4:8 and 16 tell us that God is love, and John 1:17 says that grace and reality came through Jesus Christ.
Fellowship is the transmission of love and grace. If I love a brother in my heart, I will express this love by grace, but it is by a certain kind of transmission that the grace is brought to him. Love is expressed in grace, and grace with love is in the transmission, the fellowship, of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit transmits the grace of Christ with the love of God. Therefore, the transforming Spirit in 1 and 2 Corinthians is the transmitting Spirit, transmitting the grace of Christ with the love of God.
The transforming Spirit is transforming us with a certain substance and element. This substance and element are the grace of Christ with the love of God. The transforming Spirit transforms us by transmitting the grace of Christ with the love of God into us.
Seemingly, love is first, and grace is second. However, this verse mentions grace first. This is because the subject of 2 Corinthians is the grace of Christ (1:12; 4:15; 6:1; 8:1, 9; 9:8, 14; 12:9), and our experience is mainly of grace. What we enjoy is Christ as our grace. Moreover, this grace has a source, which is the love of God, and this grace needs a transmission, which is by the Holy Spirit.
The concluding verse of Galatians says, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen” (6:18). Ephesians 6:24 says, “Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in incorruptibility,” and Philippians ends with, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit” (4:23). All these books end with grace, because grace, which is Christ Himself, is our enjoyment. This grace has a source, which is God the Father as love, and this grace comes to us by the transmission, the fellowship, of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, grace is transmitted to us in our spirit. All this is revealed to us by the final verses of these Epistles.
The transforming Spirit within us is the transmitting Spirit, transmitting the grace of Christ with the love of God for the purpose of transforming us. We can compare transformation to a chemical reaction. In order to produce a chemical change, one substance needs to be put into another. The transforming Spirit transmits Christ with God into us as our new element. This causes the “chemical change” in which we are transformed.
The Spirit is not mentioned in Galatians until the third chapter. The subject of Galatians 3 is the gospel, of which the Spirit is the center. When did the gospel begin to be preached? Some may say the gospel began with the preaching of John the Baptist or the Lord Jesus, or even on the day of Pentecost. The beginning of the gospel, however, was at the time of Abraham. Galatians 3:8 says, “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles out of faith, announced the gospel beforehand to Abraham: ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’” The time of Abraham was about two thousand years before the preaching of the New Testament dispensation. The gospel was preached even before the law was given.
The gospel that was preached to Abraham was, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” The center of the gospel is Christ, and Christ is realized as the Spirit. Verses 9 through 14 continue, “So then they who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham. For as many as are of the works of law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law to do them.’ And that by law no one is justified before God is evident because, ‘The righteous one shall have life and live by faith’; but the law is not of faith, yet, ‘He who does them shall live because of them.’ Christ has redeemed us out of the curse of the law, having become a curse on our behalf; because it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone hanging on a tree’; in order that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”
The promise of the Spirit is the Spirit of the promise mentioned in Ephesians 1:13, the Spirit whom God promised. The blessing of the gospel preached to Abraham is Christ, and Christ is realized as the Spirit. Therefore, the blessing of the gospel preached to Abraham was the promise of the Spirit. God preached the gospel to Abraham by promising him that He would give His Spirit to us as the blessing through faith.
In Galatians 3:1 through 3 Paul asks, “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly portrayed crucified? This only I wish to learn from you, Did you receive the Spirit out of the works of law or out of the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” Then in verse 5 he asks, “He therefore who bountifully supplies to you the Spirit and does works of power among you, does He do it out of the works of law or out of the hearing of faith?” These verses indicate that the center of the gospel eventually is the Spirit of promise who is bountifully supplied to us.
God’s intention is to give Himself as enjoyment to man and to work Himself into man. However, man fell and drifted further and further away from God. In the garden of Eden, man was in the place where God was. However, in Adam’s fall man drifted the first step away from God (Gen. 3:1-6), and with Cain man fell a second step (4:3-8). Originally man was created to live in the human spirit before God, but in the first and second steps of the fall, man fell out of his spirit into the soul, becoming a soulish man, a man living in the soul, like Cain. Then at the time of the flood man fell a third step (6:1-5). According to verse 3, man became flesh at this time, that is, man fell again, this time from the soul to the flesh. Finally at the time of Babel man fell a fourth step (11:1-4), this time into idols and satanic things. Idols are substitutes for God. This means that at this time man gave up God absolutely. After the first and even second steps of the fall, man still had the thought of God. By the time of the fourth fall, however, man gave up the thought of God and took idols as a substitute for God. After all these steps of the fall, man could fall no further; he had fallen to the uttermost, from the spirit to the soul, from the soul to the flesh, and from the flesh into idolatry, into idols, without God and giving up God to the uttermost.
Then one day when man was at the lowest level of the fall, God came to Abraham, who was one man among many. God came to promise to this fallen man that, on the one hand, He would accomplish the necessary redemption to bring man back to his original level and, on the other hand, that God as the Spirit would be the portion of this redeemed man for him to enjoy. The Spirit which God has supplied to us for our enjoyment is the Spirit of this promise. This promise is fulfilled by, in, through, and with Christ so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit, that is, that we might receive the Spirit Himself promised to us by God.
As fallen men, we were not on the first or second level of the fall but all the way at the fourth level, fallen to the lowest degree. Praise Him, Christ accomplished redemption for us that we might be brought back from the fall and receive the Spirit as our enjoyment. Then, after we received the Spirit of the promise, He became the Spirit of the Son. Galatians 4:6 says, “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father!” God sent the Spirit of His Son into us to make us the genuine sons of God in fact and in reality.
After coming into us, the Spirit of the Son is now the Spirit for our living (5:16, 25). Verse 25 says, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.” He is not only the Spirit of life imparting life into us but also the Spirit for our living, the Spirit by whom we live. Galatians is a book that deals with our living and walk. We must live and walk not by the law but by the Spirit.
Eventually this Spirit for our living is the fruit-bearing Spirit. Verses 22 and 23 say, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
Galatians 6:8 says, “He who sows unto his own flesh will reap corruption of the flesh, but he who sows unto the Spirit will of the Spirit reap eternal life.” In all our Christian life and walk, we must sow unto the Spirit in order to reap of the Spirit. Eventually we need to do everything in this Spirit.
The outcome of our experience of the Spirit in Galatians is that Christ is revealed in us (1:15-16), Christ lives in us (2:20), Christ is formed in us (4:19) and that we become a new creation (6:15). Galatians is not a book merely on justification by faith or on the crucifixion of our flesh and its lust. Instead, the result of our experience of the Spirit is something very positive.
This book preaches an ancient yet new gospel. This gospel has the promise that God will put His Spirit into the man who is fallen to the uttermost to be the Spirit of the Son, the Spirit for our living, the fruit-bearing Spirit, and the Spirit unto whom we sow and of whom we reap. Now we simply must live, walk, and do everything in this Spirit. As the outcome, Christ is revealed in us, lives in us, and is formed in us, and we are an absolutely new creation.
