Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Galatians · About this commentary
The Whole Law in One Word
Galatians 5:13-15
13 For you, brothers, were called for freedom. Only don’t use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants to one another. · WEB
Freedom is given a limit and a use in the same breath, and the law the letter has argued against as a means of justification is quoted as still binding on conduct.
You were called for freedom — the letter's word again, and the calling is God's. Then the qualification, introduced by a word that means only: do not use the freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. The noun is a military one, a base of operations. Liberty can be occupied and used as a staging ground for the very thing it liberated from.
What freedom is for comes in one clause, and it answers anyone who thinks grace produces laxity: through love be servants to one another. The verb is to serve as a slave — the word the letter has spent four chapters escaping Galatians 4:9 Galatians 5:1. The vocabulary of bondage is reassigned: freedom from law-as-justification issues in voluntary slavery to one another.
Then verse 14. The whole law is fulfilled in one word, in this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself Leviticus 19:18.
The law is quoted, from Leviticus, as the standard for Christian conduct, in the same letter that says no flesh is justified by works of law Galatians 2:16. The two are not in tension once the question each answers is kept straight. The law never justified anyone and its custodial office has ended Galatians 3:25; what it requires is summed up in a command that the Spirit's fruit produces.
Verse 15 names the alternative in animal terms — if you bite and devour one another — and the warning is mutual destruction. A congregation arguing about circumcision was already doing it.
settled What this mark means