Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Galatians · About this commentary
Christ Lives in Me
Galatians 2:20-21
20 I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. That life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me. · WEB
The most quoted sentence in the letter is in the perfect tense, and the paragraph ends by pricing the alternative.
I have been crucified with Christ. The tense is a completed action with a standing result, and the pronoun placement in Greek is emphatic — it is Paul's own execution he is reporting.
Then the clause that has to be held together rather than resolved: it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. The sentence denies and affirms the same subject. Paul does not describe an absence but a replacement of the animating center, and he immediately makes clear that the ordinary life continues — that life which I now live in the flesh is still his to live.
How he lives it is stated: by faith in the Son of God. Faith is not the moment of entry here but the medium of the whole subsequent life, which answers the letter's question a second way. If faith is how a justified man goes on living, adding law-keeping is a change of medium rather than an improvement.
The last clause of verse 20 is the most personal in the letter: who loved me and gave himself up for me. Both verbs are singular. Paul has been arguing about gentiles and covenants and pillars, and the ground of it comes down to a first-person pronoun twice.
Verse 21 closes with the accounting. If righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nothing. The word for nothing means without cause, gratuitously — a death with no purchase to show for it. That is the cost of the position the Galatians are drifting toward, and Paul states it as arithmetic rather than as insult.
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