TRISTAN SHERWIN

THEME: God’s Paternity and the Maternal Promise

Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (31st August, 2025), continuing our FREE TO GOD series which explores Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).

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‘Scars signal skin in the game.’

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb[i]

‘See, from his head, his hands, his feet | sorrow and love flow mingled down.’

―Isaac Watts[ii]

READ: GALATIANS 4:21-5:1 (NLT)

RISK

There’s a phrase that is often used in sports, business, and even politics: ‘Do they have skin in the game?’

It general, it means: do they have something personally at stake? Have they invested time, effort, money, or reputation. Have they sacrificed or risked anything.

When someone has skin in the game, we usually take it as a positive.

And when they don’t? . . .

There’s a fascinating writer, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who makes the insightful observation that, when those at the very top—our business leaders, our political leaders—make decisions that barely scratch their own lives whilst having a massive impact on the people they lead and supposedly represent, then we, understandably have a right to be suspicious.

Can you imagine a world in which political leaders shared in the experience and the risks of their people? I’m not saying they don’t find themselves in the same stormy waters, but they are rarely in the same boat.

In totally corrupt regimes, the leaders walk away with all the winnings whilst the people bear all the bruises.

It’s the same in business. If you enter into a business agreement, if you ‘cut a deal’ with another party, and that other party is sharing in all the success and profits of the deal but is protected from all the losses and failures, then something dodgy is going on.

I’ve worked at construction companies where contracts have lost money—the business has suffered financially, and so the workers, the so-called ‘little people’ have lost their jobs, whilst the directors leading the business have walked away with ‘golden handshakes.’

As Taleb points out,

‘[W]hat people resent—or should resent—is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, he is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting his income or wealth bracket, and waiting in line outside the soup kitchen.’[iii]

It’s a good thing when people have skin in the game, when they are vulnerable and unimmune. It means they are serious, and that they can be trusted because they will share the lows and the highs with us.

Paul’s message to the Galatians takes that whole idea and, with regards to us, turns it upside down. When it comes to gospel, Paul says, you and I don’t want skin in the game. The promises of God are not secured by our humanity effort or sacrifice. Rather, the promise of God rests entirely on God fulfilling his own promise. God takes on all the risk.

As Paul writes elsewhere, quoting an early Christian song, in Jesus, God voluntarily stepped down from his pedestal, not clinging to any immunity; out of compassion, God exited his elite status, becoming human and a servant to humanity; and humbling himself even further, in order to redeem us, God did more than merely stand in line to a soup kitchen with us, but died a criminal’s death upon a cross.[iv]

The gospel is not about our skin in the game. The only skin in the game, is God’s.

SKIN

From a certain perspective, skin has been the central subject matter of debate within Paul’s entire letter.

To be precise: a certain piece of skin on a certain part of the male anatomy.[v]

Without repeating what we have said in previous weeks, Paul has been arguing against a group of Jewish Christians who are pressuring non-Jewish Christians (the Galatians) to adopt circumcision, to literally put their skin in the game. Their underlying argument has been that to be legitimate inheritors of what God had promised through Abraham, you had to become Jewish.

Paul, who is Jewish, who is circumcised (he’s not antisemitic) has been saying this isn’t true.

A new era has dawned; God’s promise to Abraham as been fulfilled and delivered through Jesus, and he has poured out the Holy Spirit on Jew and Gentile alike.

As Paul will make explicit in the next chapter, ‘For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision carries any weight – the only thing that matters is faith working through love.’[vi]

From the beginning of chapter 3, Paul has been using the story of Abraham to explain why this is—a story we’ll explore in a moment.

In what we have just read, we reach the end of Paul’s argument, his grand finale.

But it’s a confusing and dense way to end.

Everyone I have read agrees that this is the hardest passage in the book of Galatians. Paul, in a few sentences, starts pulling in a truckload of ideas and images he hasn’t referred to so far (Like, what’s with the mountains all of a sudden?). He even uses allegory—something Paul does nowhere else, in any of his letters. And, depending upon what we think Paul is saying, his use of the story of Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, is not the best and could be picked apart.

It all feels … rushed.

Not to mention that, in addition to how complex this passage is, sadly, in the history of the church, some later interpreters have used this passage to some harmful antisemitic extents.

I’m not getting into all of that.

What is going on?

As many commentators note, the likely reason Paul ends in this curious way is that his rivals have already used an allegory of this story to reinforce their own argument as to why uncircumcised gentile believers are illegitimate.[vii] It is Paul’s rivals who initially brought up Hagar and Ishmael in a negative light; they’re the ones who have brought mountains into the equation.

We’re not sure of the nature of their argument—and I’m not going to guess. But the bottom line is that Paul, in this complex passage, is turning his rival’s conclusions back on themselves.

Paul’s rivals are counting on human effort to get right with God; they are trusting in circumcision, of putting their own skin in the game, as a means of entering God’s family and a marker of proving they are part of it.

They think they are free. But Paul is arguing that they are enchained in legalism.

Echoing what he has written throughout this letter, Paul is saying that it’s not about proving yourself or making God’s promise come true by your effort. No, the gospel is about what God has done to fulfil his own promise.

‘MUMS’ THE WORD

The central verse in this passage, for me, is verse 23. Paul writes,

‘The son of the slave wife was born in a human attempt to bring about the fulfillment of God’s promise. But the son of the freeborn wife was born as God’s own fulfillment of his promise.’[viii]

If you know your Hebrew Bible, you’ll know the story that Paul (returning the hand served to him by his rivals) is referring to: the story of Sarah and Hagar.

We’re going to go through it anyway, so don’t worry if you don’t. However, before we do, it’s important that we don’t misread Paul.

When he uses Sarah and Hagar in his argument, Paul is not condemning one woman and praising the other. This isn’t a morality play.[ix] This kind of simplistic reading flattens the story.

Paul is not turning Sarah into a flawless hero, and neither is he vilifying Hagar. In the story of Genesis, Sarah is certainly not faultless, and Hagar is most definitely more victim than villain. The whole story is a messy one—the messiest episode in Abraham’s catalogue. And both women offer us beautiful insights to learn from.[x]

Paul is not pitting the women against each other, saying, ‘Sarah good, Hagar bad,’ or ‘Isaac good, Ishmael bad.’[xi] Paul is not saying, ‘be more Sarah’.

Paul is making a theological point by highlighting the contrast between slavery to our own attempts and freedom through God’s own fulfilment of his promise. This theological contrast is not based on Sarah versus Hagar—the contrast is between Abraham and Sarah’s own strategies vis-à-vis the design of God.

The story Paul is picking up is from Genesis chapter 16.

Abram and Sarai, as they are known at this point, are getting on in their years. Abram is eighty-six, Sarai is seventy-six years old. They have been desperately trying to have a child, with no success. Their age is not only against them, but also, Sarai is ‘barren’—a harmful label her culture would have stigmatised her with.

In her ancient culture, barrenness would be seen as a scandal and an embarrassment. People, wrongly, would have seen it as a sign that she lacked favour from God, or that she was cursed due to some misdemeanour.

And yet, we know, as readers of this story that none of this is true. God is not underwriting this cultural farce, because the only reason Abram and Sarai are trying to conceive, against all the odds, is because God had specifically chosen them in his plan of redemption. Sarah is highly favoured.

In the chapter before this, Genesis 15, God had made a promise to Abram that he would make him a father, and that his offspring, his seed, would be a blessing to the nations. That, through this child, God would restore and redeem all of humanity.

Instead of experiencing the joy of this promise, though, Abram and Sarai have known nothing but the heartache of hope deferred.

When we meet them at the beginning of Genesis 16, the years have passed, and ‘those promises … had been delayed and frustrated and delayed again, until it seemed ridiculous to keep the dream alive.’[xii]

All of us, I am certain, have experienced a similar sense of frustration and disappointment as we have waited upon, and remain waiting upon, the materialisation of the promises of God. And so, we can understand why this couple felt the pressure to improvise.

You can imagine the tear-filled conversation in their tent at night: ‘What’s the point, Abe! It isn’t working. God spoke to you, not me….’. Sarai, mistakenly assuming the promise was only specific to Abram and not also herself, and sensing that the problem lay with her, proposes a ‘cunning plan’, like Baldrick in Black Adder. So, following the social customs of the time, Sarai gives her servant, an Egyptian woman named Hagar, over to Abram as a surrogate mother.[xiii]

The plan is full of cultural common sense. Yet, the plan misfires. Sure, Hagar becomes pregnant and bears a son—Ishmael. But there’s no more happy family. Strife and heartache, bullying and ill treatment rip through the household, dividing the Abrahamic homestead (a parallel, maybe, of what Paul’s rivals are inflicting upon the Galatian church).

Not to mention the fact that Abram and Sarai attempt to force the promise into being via the victimisation and utilisation of another’s body.[xiv] It’s important to note, I think, when you read the story, that Hagar remains a ‘speechless’ character during this scene. Scripture’s portrayal of Hagar exposes that she has no say in the matter, nor is she consulted with. She is treated like a ‘thing’ and just handed over.

It’s a painful episode.

Certainly, God, in his grace, meets with and blesses Hagar and her son, Ishmael.[xv] Hagar, by the way, is the first woman in the Scriptures to receive from God a direct announcement of a promised child. She is also the first person in the Bible to give God a name (El-roi, ‘God sees’). And although her name means ‘stranger’, her child’s name, Ishmael, perfectly captures the remarkable truth that ‘God hears’—even when no one else cares to listen, when we are estranged, God hears.

God’s compassionate heart and grace fills this story. The goodness of God, as the writer of Psalm thirty-four words it, is tasted and seen, nourishing Hagar. But as with all grace, it’s made vividly manifest in a messy, tragic valley where human effort crumbles—a story in which Abram and Sarai attempt to force the promise of God by not only putting their skin in the game but also co-opting someone else’s skin in the game.

(Again, maybe another echo of what Paul’s rivals are attempting in Galatia.)[xvi]

This wasn’t the way to bring about God’s promise.

Fourteen years later, in the narrative of Genesis 17 and 18, God speaks again to Abram and Sarai, bringing a reminder about his promise. God is clear that this isn’t just about Abram, but Sarai, as well; they will both bear a son. God changes their names to Abraham and Sarah, as a way of affirming that through their offspring they will be the parents of many nations.

They both laugh at this.[xvii] Who can blame them?

Abraham is one hundred, Sarah is ninety. Abraham recognises he and his wife are all dried up. Sarah knows she is barren and, using a Hebrew euphemism, long past fertility—plus, her husband, as she calls him, is an old greybeard.[xviii] It’s humanly impossible.

Paul, in another letter (Romans), along with the writer of Hebrews, both describe the couple ‘as good as dead.’[xix]

Their laughter is reasonable: How can God bring life out things incapable of bearing life, lifeless seed, a lifeless womb?

And yet, one year later, when Genesis 21 picks up the story, Isaac is born to them. His name means laughter. Or, to be more precise within the context of the story, ‘God has had the last laugh.’

As Eugene Peterson described it, rewording Galatians 4:23,

‘Ishmael was a product of the human trying to do God’s work for him; Isaac was the result of God doing his own work, in his own time.’[xx]

It’s miraculous! It’s not a virgin birth, but it is divine intervention all the same.

As someone else words it, ‘God fulfilled his promise by his mighty power to do the impossible, to bring life and renewal out of what is old and dead.’[xxi]

Old. Dead.

Both words lack a complementary nod to any human. No one would use such self-descriptions on a job application or to ‘big themselves up’ before others.

This deadness, this barrenness, this human incapacity, however, is the key theme Paul is drawing out in Galatians 4.

It’s a theme that is central to the whole story of Scripture and God’s outworking of his promise.[xxii] It’s not unique to Sarah, either.

Sarah’s daughter-in-law, Rebekah was also barren.

Rebekah’s daughter-in-law, Rachel, was in the same predicament.

Into all this infertility, human incapability to birth the promise, there is miraculous birth after miraculous birth, so that ‘The children born to them are seen, in some way, to be marked out as divine gifts: in a strong sense, God’s children.’[xxiii] Not merely the product of human skin in the game, but a creation of God’s prevailing action.

The same story is echoed behind Paul’s quote of Isaiah 54, in verse 27.

Isaiah 54 was written to Israel in exile. God’s people were like a barren woman — cut off, unfruitful, seemingly without a future. Yet God promises to restore and to make them fruitful.

Just as Abraham and Sarah laughed when God promised them a child in their dead-old age, Israel in exile must have thought restoration was impossible. But, even when God’s people are barren, exiled, hopeless, and humanly incapable of restoring themselves, God is the one who brings life where there is none.

More than this, as Isaiah states, God would bring supernatural multiplication—the people of God would be expanded: they would fill the nations, Isaiah goes on to say.

As Paul has been pointing out throughout this letter to the Galatians, when God comes round to fulfilling all he has promised, it won’t only be Jewish people who are classed as Abraham’s children, but all the nations of the world.[xxiv]

In all of these narratives, from the Matriarchs to the Exile, there’s an important theme that Paul is putting before us.

If we zoom out a little and look across the whole chapter, you may have noticed how striking it is that, in a letter infused with male anatomy, Galatians 4 is dominated with mother and birth terminology.

In a single chapter, we have had the barren and forsaken mother mentioned by Isaiah; the stories of Hagar and Sarah; Paul (as Tom touched on last week), in verse 19, even speaks of his own ministry as being like motherhood.

None of this is accidental, nor incidental.[xxv]

At the crux of it all, right at the very beginning of chapter 4, Paul reminds us of Jesus’ parentage:

‘But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman…’[xxvi]

Notice what Paul doesn’t say. He emphasizes Jesus’ being born of a woman —without human siring. As in Sarah’s story and Isaiah’s story, God’s promise comes in a way that bypasses human attempts.

In Jesus’ case, as espoused in Matthew and Luke’s gospels, the male party is bypassed completely.

Paul is insisting that, if you want to understand God’s promise and God’s fulfilment of that promise, if you want to understand the gospel, then you need to look to the maternal line.

It’s not about Abraham’s fatherhood, as such, but God’s parenthood in doing the impossible for us.

Like we see in the story of Abram and Sarai, the human way is attempting to make things happen in our own strength. But God’s way is to bring life where there is no life, no human capacity; God’s promise comes about through sheer grace, through God’s action.

As Zechariah was asked to remind Zerubbabel, ‘‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty.’

There’s no skin in the game, so to speak.

God has done it all, in God’s time.

FORE OR AGAINST

Circumcision, originally, was about that very message.

Way back when God gave his original promise with Abram, in Genesis 15, and Abram trusted that promise, Abram wasn’t circumcised.

It’s vital to see this.

Paul has already hinted at this at the beginning of Galatians 3 (verse 6). Against his rival’s, Paul is showing that Abram’s ‘Jewishness’ lacked both Torah and circumcision when he trusted in the promise of God and God declared him righteous. From the rival’s perspective, then, Abram would have been an un-Jewish Jew.

But back to the story;

In Genesis 15, after making the promise, God then cuts a ‘deal’, a covenant with Abram. In the ancient world ‘cutting a covenant’ was a binding contract. It literally involved taking an animal, cutting it in two and then laying the halves of this animal on the ground to form a pathway that both parties would walk through.

It was a way of saying, ‘if I don’t keep my part of the deal, may I end up like this.’ It symbolised putting your skin in the game.

In the story of Genesis 15, however, Abraham cuts the animals in two and gets everything prepped for the covenant ceremony — but then God puts him into a deep sleep. Abraham doesn’t walk through the pieces. God himself passes between them. It’s a unilateral covenant. God is saying: This depends on me, not on you.

There was no “skin in the game” from Abraham. The promise didn’t rest on his action at all.

It’s only in Genesis 17, after Abram and Sarai’s messy human attempt of fulfilling the promise, that circumcision comes along.

God takes an existing cultural practice and transforms its meaning[xxvii]: Abraham is instructed to circumcise every male in his household as a way of saying that human effort was not needed for God to bring about what God had promised. This was to happen in every generation, until God brought about his promise in his own time.

It’s as if God were saying to Abraham, ‘you didn’t seem to get this the first time, when I put you to sleep, so … ‘

The circumcision of Abraham—and his household!—symbolised not putting your skin in the game. God is saying, like with the unilateral covenant of Genesis 15, ‘I’ll do this without your help … and don’t think of co-opting anyone else, either.’

Paul’s opponents in Galatia were treating circumcision as though it were the entry requirement to God’s promise. But Paul rightly insists that the promise was given long before, as sheer gift, and that circumcision was a sign of the covenant—a sign of our un-involvement–not the basis of it.

More than this, Paul insists, in Jesus—the ultimate seed of Abraham[xxviii]—God has accomplished what the symbol has always pointed toward.

The symbol of circumcision was never about having our skin in the game.

It’s always been about the promise of God and God fulfilling that promise in his time, and in Jesus Christ, when the right time had come, God has brought his promise to fulfilment.

Again, as Paul will say it, ‘When we place our faith in Christ Jesus, it makes no difference to God whether we are circumcised or not.’[xxix]

Paul is not anti-circumcision, as I said the first week. He is not pro-circumcision, either. In the era of Kingdom—even in the overlap of the ages—it’s irrelevant. And a legalistic approach, that says ‘you must in order to…’ is abhorrent and a denial of God having fulfilled his promise in the risen Messiah.

The gospel is not about how much skin we put in the game. It never has been. It’s about trusting that God has done everything he promised through Jesus Christ.

That’s the shock of the gospel. When humanity could not produce life, God brought life; not through our plans, not through us “helping God out,” but through God’s miraculous initiative.

Out of a tomb, a dead place, God brought forth resurrecting life.

I would like to think that, as the resurrected Jesus walked the Emmaus Road as a stranger, opening two of his followers’ minds to see his own suffering, burial and resurrection in the preceding story of scripture, that Sarah’s womb would have featured. God opens the dead places. Out of an empty tomb, like the empty womb, the promise of divine life is made manifest

God made his covenant with Abraham while Abraham slept.

God opened Sarah’s womb when she was old and barren.

God sent his own Son, born of a woman, without male help.

And in the skin of Christ—his life, death and resurrection—God has done everything necessary for our salvation.

That’s why Paul says the gospel is freedom. Because if it depended on us, upon our skin in the game, we’d always be in chains, anxious about whether we’d done enough. But if it depends on God, then we are free — truly free.

This is good news, especially for the barren.

As Tim Keller put it, ‘If salvation is by works, then only the “fertile” can have “children”. Only the morally able and strong, the people from good families, the folk with good records can be spiritually fruitful, [and] enjoy the love and joy of God … But if the gospel is true, it does not matter who you are or who you were.’[xxx]

We can all become children of God.

As Jesus put it, in his own beautiful sermon: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, the spiritually dead and old, ‘for the Kingdom of God is given to them.’[xxxi]

As the great John Wesley explained:

‘We who believe, whether Jews or Gentiles, are children of the promise—Not born in a natural way, but by the supernatural power of God. And as such we are heirs of the promise made to believing Abraham.’[xxxii]

Salvation, forgiveness, new life, the life of the Holy Spirit, God living in us … none of it is about our skin in the game. It’s about God’s faithfulness. God’s gift. God’s work and sacrifice. It’s through his wounds, his bruised skin, that we are healed and made new.[xxxiii] We’re merely called to trust, receive and live in the freedom and new identity God has given to us.

Sometimes, especially when we sense our spiritual bankruptcy, we attempt to improvise and compensate by seeing what we can bring or sacrifice to God, seeking to coax pleasure out of God.

There’s nothing wrong, in and of itself, in seeking to please God. This is a great thing. But watch the motive and reasoning behind such acts. Your sacrifice has not and will never bring God’s love to you. God’s sacrifice has done this—All glory to Him alone, as Paul writes at the beginning of Galatians.

To re-word the words of the Puritan, Richard Sibbes (1577-1635): If you want to please God, know that nothing pleases Christ more than partaking of his rich provision.[xxxiv]

Let go of putting your skin in game. Entrust yourself, fully, whole-heartedly and gladly, to all he has done for you, for me, for all.

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‘And so a whole nation came from this one man who was as good as dead—a nation with so many people that, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, there is no way to count them.’

— Hebrews 11:12 (NLT)

‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he gave us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead … For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.’

— 1 Peter 1:3 (NET), 23 (NIV)

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ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

[i] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Allen Lane, Penguin Books, London, 2018), p. 147.

[ii] Isaac Watts, When I Survey the Wonderous Cross, third stanza (1707)

[iii] Ibid, p. 155

[iv] Philippians 2:5-11

[v] Brigitte Kahl labelled Paul’s letter to Galatians as the most ‘Phallocentric’ of all the New Testament writings. As she notes, ‘In terms of vocabulary, masculinity indeed appears to be another strong focus of Galatians. Hardly any other New Testament document is so densely populated by male body-language as this letter [sic] the terms foreskin, circumcision/circumcise, and sperm occur 22 times … Even the gospel itself is linked to male anatomy, with Paul coining the two rather striking phrases ‘gospel of the foreskin’ and ‘gospel of the circumcision (2:7).’ [Kahl, Brigitte, No Longer Male: Masculinity Struggles behind Galatians 3.28? (Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 2000 (79)). p. 40].

With regards to her comment of Galatians 2:7, Kahl is correct to state that the Greek word we often translate as uncircumcised (ἀκροβυστίας, akrobystia) is the actual Greek word foreskin.

[vi] Galatians 5:6 (NET)

[vii] As Keener notes, ‘If 3:6 introduced Paul’s own argument from Abraham, 4:21 may introduce his refutation of his opponents’ argument from Abraham. … For many centuries some scholars have suggested that the curious character of Paul’s argument here stems from him opposing an argument by his rivals. This is probably the majority view of commentators today as well.’ [Craig S. Keener, Galatians: A Commentary (Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2019), pp. 399-400, and his footnote references]. Or, as Gupta words it, ‘we can guess with some confidence that Paul was offering a counternarrative of the Abrahamic story to the one told by Paul’s rivals in Galatia.’ [Nijay K. Gupta, Galatians: The Story of God Bible Commentary (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2023), p.196].

[viii] Galatians 4:23 (NLT)

[ix]As N. T. Wright has noted (when discussing Paul’s employment of allegory), unlike the works of other ancient allegorises such as Plutarch, with the old Homeric gods and heroes, or Philo, with the characters of Genesis, who both flattened their subjects into representations of various vices and virtues, Paul does not ‘make Hagar or Sarah, or indeed Abraham, represent virtues or vices. [Paul] is talking about the covenant history of Israel.’ [N. T. Wright, Commentaries for Christian Formation: Galatians (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p. 295]

[x] For some great insights into both extraordinary women, I’d recommend: Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell’s (eds), Hagar, Sarah, and their Children: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006); Sandra Glahn’s (ed), Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualised, Vilified, and Marginalised Women of the Bible (Kregal Publications, 2017); Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne (Westminster John Knox Press, 2017).

[xi] After all, ‘Hagar’s story’ in reality, as Paul indicates in verse 23, was really Abraham and Sarah’s human attempt, by utilising Hagar, to achieve what God had promised.

[xii] Brian D. McClaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation and Activation (Hodder & Stoughton, An Hachette Company, London, UK, 2014), p. 83.

[xiii] Genesis 16:1-3

[xiv] As a beautiful aside, it’s only in Hagar’s conversations with God that we hear her voice.

[xv] As recorded in Genesis 16:9-15, ‘Hagar receives the first divine annunciation to a woman in the canon of a promised child and a promise of a dynasty. Hagar will become the Mother of Many Peoples.’ [Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne (Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), p.41]

[xvi] Considering Paul’s strong words in Galatians 4:17, 5:12, and his reference to what the ‘circumcision party’ attempted with Titus, as mentioned in Galatians 2:4, where Paul uses the Greek word for forceful compulsion.

[xvii] We often only recall Sarah’s laughter, in Genesis 18:11-12. But Abraham also laughs to himself in Genesis 17:17-18.

[xviii] In Genesis 18:12, Sarah refers to Abraham, in the Hebrew, as זָקֵן (zāqēn), literally translated greybeard. As Robert Alter notes, ‘When Sarah repeats … her interior monologue, it is given new meaning from her bodily perspective as an old and barren woman: her flesh is shriveled, she cannot imagine having pleasure again (the tern ‘ednah is cognate of with Eden and probably suggests sexual pleasure, or perhaps even sexual moistness), and besides—her husband is old.’ [Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation and Commentary, The Five Books of Moses (W. W. Norton and Company, New York, London, 2019), p. 57]

[xix] Romans 4:19; Hebrews 11:12

[xx] Eugene H. Peterson, Traveling Light: Modern Meditations on St. Paul’s Letter of Freedom (Helmers & Howard, Colorado Springs, USA, 1988), p. 131

[xxi] Nijay K. Gupta, Galatians: The Story of God Bible Commentary (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2023), p. 200

[xxii] As Eugene Merrill, ‘[Sarah’s] barrenness [is not incidental], however, [it] is explicitly noted [in the Genesis story] as an important motif, as indeed such barrenness was all through biblical history.’ [Sandra Glahn (ed), Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualised, Vilified, and Marginalised Women of the Bible (Kregal Publications, 2017), p. 152]

[xxiii] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation: Genesis, The Book of Beginnings (Maggid Books & The Orthodox Union, 2009), p. 92

[xxiv] As an important aside, Isaiah’s promise of this expansion of God’s people follows immediately on from his song about the Suffering Servant, the One who bears the sins of the people, the One who is beaten and led like a lamb to slaughter on behalf of others—a song, as seen in the New Testament and Christian theology, that is intimately tied to Jesus’ own sufferings and crucifixion.

It’s also important to note that Isaiah 54:2, which follows on from what Paul quotes, mentions the descendants of this barren woman taking over nations. Wrongly interpretated, this could imply ethnic dominance more than a widening of the people of God to include other ethnicities. However, this verse needs to be read alongside other passages of Isaiah (such as, Isaiah 22:6-8; 49:6; 66:6-8; 60:1-3, for example), Psalms like Psalm 87, and held in the perspective of the great promise given to Abraham.

[xxv] I’m indebted to Brigitte Kahl’s article for pointing this out: No Longer Male: Masculinity Struggles behind Galatians 3.28? (Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 2000 (79))

[xxvi] Galatians 4:4

[xxvii] It’s worth pointing this out, but neither God nor the Bible invented circumcision. The practice had existed for years in wider cultural settings. The oldest evidence of circumcision comes from ancient Egypt, with depictions of the procedure in tombs dating to the 6th Dynasty (around 2355-2343 BCE). So, as with things like the sacrifices and some of the laws instructed in the Mosaic law, God meets people where they are culturally, takes an existing cultural pattern and ‘tweaks’ it to point towards something more. I have spoken about this elsewhere, in our series through Exodus: GRAVE TO CRADLE | STONES & GOAT’S MILK

[xxviii] As seen in Galatians 3:8-9, 15-16

[xxix] Galatians 5:6 (Italics mine)

[xxx] Timothy Keller, Galatians For You (God’s Word For You), (The Good Book Company. Kindle Edition.), p. 134

[xxxi] Matthew 5:3 (Italic mine)

[xxxii]John Wesley, Explanatory Notes on the New Testament (Kindle Edition), Galatians 4:28

[xxxiii] Isaiah 53:4-11

[xxxiv] ‘We cannot please Christ better than in showing ourselves welcome, by cheerful taking part of his rich provision. It is an honour to his bounty to fall to.’ As quoted in Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois, 2020), p. 36