Biblion Bible Commentary
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In Travail Until Christ Is Formed
Galatians 4:17-20
17 They zealously seek you in no good way. No, they desire to alienate you, that you may seek them. · WEB
The troublers' method is named as flattery with a purpose, and Paul's counter-image makes himself the mother rather than the father.
Verse 17 describes the opponents' technique rather than their doctrine, and the diagnosis is direction. They zealously seek you — attentive, eager, flattering — in no good way. The aim: they desire to alienate you, that you may seek them. The courtship is built to reverse itself; attention is spent to be received back.
That is a description of how a following is built, and Paul has already named the payoff: they want to boast in a tally of converts Galatians 6:13.
Verse 18 concedes what is good in zeal — it is always good to be zealous in a good cause — and adds the clause that stings: and not only when I am present with you. Their eagerness had been steady while he was in the room.
Then verse 19, and the image is one no other letter of his uses. My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ is formed in you. Paul makes himself the woman in labor, and the labor is again — he has done this once, and the pains have restarted over people already born.
What is being formed is not Paul's teaching in them but Christ in them. The verb belongs to the shaping of a body in the womb, and the object of the whole painful process is a person taking shape in other people.
Verse 20 admits the limit of a letter: he wishes he could be present and change my tone, because he is perplexed. The man who has just pronounced a curse and called them foolish says plainly that he does not know how to say this at a distance.
settled What this mark means