Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Galatians · About this commentary
Deliverance from This Present Age
Galatians 1:3-5
3 Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, · WEB
The standard greeting is expanded into a statement of what the cross accomplished, and the goal named is rescue rather than improvement.
Grace and peace arrive as usual, and then the greeting does something greetings do not: it defines the gospel before the letter has begun to argue for it.
Christ gave himself for our sins — the giving is reflexive, his own act rather than something done to him, which is the letter's consistent way of putting it Galatians 2:20. And the purpose clause is the part worth slowing over: that he might deliver us out of this present evil age.
The word is rescue, the kind performed on someone who cannot get out. And what he is rescued from is not described as a set of habits or a debt but as an age — a whole order of things with a character, named evil, and named present. The Galatians' problem is being placed inside something larger than a doctrinal mistake before the mistake is mentioned.
That framing matters for what follows. A letter that treated the trouble as an error of information could have corrected it with information. This one treats the readers as people who have been rescued from a system and are edging back toward one, which is exactly the charge in chapter 4 Galatians 4:9.
The last clause anchors it: according to the will of our God and Father. The rescue was not a rescue from God's disposition but an expression of it. Then a doxology closes the greeting, and the marveling begins.
settled What this mark means