The Whole Law in One Word
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. 14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 But if you bite and devour one another, be careful that you don’t consume one another.
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