5:5
Righteousness can be viewed in two ways. One is our legal standing before God, and we are justified now. It can also be looked at in terms of our moral standing. Now none of us meets God’s standards in our own right, though hopefully we are making progress! If we truly belong to Christ we will long to be righteous, we will long for every aspect of our being to be in tune with God. Now the Galatians were, like all Christians, no doubt keenly aware of their imperfections, that there was still sin in their lives. This is one of the reasons why the arguments of the Judaisers would seem attractive, for it offered a way of supposedly being “more righteous” now. Paul has spent a couple chapters explaining why this is a forlorn hope. So what are we to do instead? “Through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith”. This is not a passive waiting, but a waiting that is relying on the Holy Spirit, and is by faith.
5:6
We get more of the “active waiting” at the end of this verse. Paul has been telling them that circumcision will not help them, indeed it renders Christ of no value to them. He now makes clear that uncircumcision is of no value either. Ie in terms of being pleasing to God it is totally irrelevant whether or not a man is circumcised. This is why it was fine for Jews to be circumcised, and why in Acts 16:3 we read that Paul had Timothy circumcised. The problem only arose if someone started relying on circumcision in order to be acceptable to God. What does matter in our lives now is “faith expressing itself through love”. When Paul talks about faith and waiting he is not talking about being passive. Faith is not a mere intellectual assent to a doctrine, but a living and active thing that expresses itself through love. And we will see in the following verses that theology matters, what we believe will affect how we live.
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