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Galatians 4:21-31 - Hagar, Sarah, and the Jerusalem Above

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Paul has just pleaded with the Galatians like a mother laboring until Christ is formed in them. Now he challenges the desire that threatens that formation: “you who desire to be under the law.” His answer is unexpected. He does not leave the Law behind. He asks them to hear it more carefully, then returns to Abraham’s household and to Isaiah’s promise of a once-barren city filled with children.

The passage turns on a question of birth and inheritance. Will God’s family be defined by what human beings can secure through descent and imposed boundary marks, or by the promise God fulfills in Christ? Paul answers with two mothers, two covenants, and two Jerusalems. His argument is severe, especially when he quotes, “Cast out the bondwoman and her son.” It must be read with the same discipline Paul brings to Scripture: Hagar remains a real enslaved Egyptian woman whom God saw and protected, Israel’s Scriptures remain holy, and no people become legitimate objects of Christian contempt. The inheritance comes from God’s promise, and the promise gives birth to freedom.

The Law Testifies to Promise (Galatians 4:21-23)

21 Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman. 23 But he who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the freewoman through promise,

Paul repeats “law” with deliberate force: those who want to be under the Law must learn to hear the Law. Genesis is not an embarrassment he must overcome. It is the witness he calls against the Galatians’ proposed submission. The Law’s own account of Abraham shows that physical descent from Abraham does not by itself explain the promised inheritance.1

The household story is real before it becomes part of Paul’s argument. Genesis identifies Hagar as an Egyptian enslaved woman in Sarah’s household. Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham, Hagar suffers affliction, and mother and son are later expelled. Yet God meets Hagar in the wilderness, hears Ishmael, and promises that he too will become a nation (Genesis 16:1-16; 21:8-21). Paul selects one contrast from that larger history for the Galatian crisis. His allegory does not exhaust everything Scripture says about Hagar or Ishmael.

For an Egyptian Christian, Hagar’s story may sound especially close. God sees her in affliction (Genesis 16:13); Isaiah later promises an altar to the Lord in Egypt and God’s blessing upon its people (Isaiah 19:19, 25).2 These passages do not turn Hagar into an emblem of the Coptic Church. They remind the Church of Alexandria that the God who sees the enslaved Egyptian also calls Egyptians into His people. In Christ, belonging is given by promise, not denied by the country or condition of one’s birth.

Verse 22 emphasizes status: one mother is enslaved and the other free. Verse 23 adds the mode of birth. Ishmael is born “according to the flesh,” through ordinary human generation and a household arrangement meant to secure an heir. Isaac is born “through promise,” after Sarah’s barrenness and the parents’ old age have made clear that God’s word, rather than human capacity, creates the heir. Paul is not calling the body evil. “According to the flesh” here names descent and human provision treated as the ground of inheritance; “through promise” names God’s effective word as the source of the promised son.3

That distinction reaches the Galatians directly. Some teachers were pressing Gentile believers to receive circumcision as necessary for covenant belonging. Paul reminds them that their place in Abraham’s family began with God’s promise fulfilled in Christ, not with an ancestry they could acquire or a religious badge they could add. The Son redeemed them and the Spirit cried “Abba, Father” in their hearts before this new demand appeared (Galatians 3:26-29; 4:4-7). Their security rests in the God who gives what human effort cannot manufacture.

Paul’s question reaches any reader who can cite Scripture while resisting its correction. We may approach the Bible looking for authorization to secure rank, certainty, or belonging, then hurry past the words that place inheritance in God’s promise. Hearing the Law means allowing God’s word to expose the guarantee we are trying to manufacture. Obedience remains, but it begins as the response of children who have received the promise in Christ, not as a payment meant to make God recognize us as heirs.

Two Covenants and the Free Mother-City (Galatians 4:24-27)

24 which things are symbolic. For these are the two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar— 25 for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children— 26 but the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all. 27 For it is written: “Rejoice, O barren, You who do not bear! Break forth and shout, You who are not in labor! For the desolate has many more children Than she who has a husband.”

The NKJV calls the events “symbolic.” Paul’s Greek, allēgoroumena, names an allegorical reading: real events bear a further covenantal meaning.4 The next sentence gives its center: “these are the two covenants.” Paul reads Genesis through the promise to Abraham, the sonship revealed in Christ, Isaiah’s barren mother-city, and the freedom that follows in Galatians 5:1. Spiritual reading listens for this unity; it does not make Scripture mean whatever the interpreter imagines.

Paul aligns Hagar, Sinai, and “Jerusalem which now is” because, in his argument, they stand in the same column of slavery. The Greek verb systoichei, translated “corresponds to,” is classificatory. It does not say that Sinai lies geographically beside Jerusalem.5 Nor does it give Christians permission to label Jewish people as children of an inferior woman. Paul is arguing inside Israel’s Scriptures about the basis on which Gentiles enter Abraham’s inheritance. Physical Jerusalem still matters elsewhere in the letter as the place where Paul meets Peter, James, and John and receives the right hand of fellowship (Galatians 1:18; 2:1-10). Here “Jerusalem which now is” bears a polemical role because the rival teaching would place Gentiles under an order of compulsory covenant marking.

The phrase “gives birth to bondage” sharpens the image. The Greek can be heard as giving birth into slavery: the mother-city produces children within the condition she represents.6 Paul is speaking figuratively, but the figure draws power from a brutal human reality. Enslavement was domination, vulnerability, and loss of freedom, not a harmless mood. The Church should feel the seriousness of Paul’s warning without allowing the metaphor to erase the enslaved woman whose name he uses.

Verse 26 changes the horizon: “the Jerusalem above is free.” Her life and citizenship come from God; she does not represent contempt for the earth, the body, or earthly communities. She is the city of God’s promised fulfillment and the mother of the people gathered in Christ. Whether the text reads “mother of us all” or “our mother,” it names a shared mother, not competing ranks of children.7

Isaiah 54:1 is the hinge of Paul’s interpretation. Galatians quotes its Greek scriptural form; Brenton’s Septuagint begins, “Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not.”8 Barren Zion, once desolate after judgment, must enlarge her tent for the children God gives. The household contrast opens into a mother-city filled beyond expectation. The Church’s fruitfulness rests neither in ancestry nor in coercion. The risen Christ gathers children by promise and gives them the Spirit of sonship.

Gems from the Fathers 💎

St John Chrysostom preserves the history while explaining its further meaning: it “announces somewhat farther.”9 Genesis remains a real account, and its place in God’s saving purpose becomes luminous. Christian spiritual reading need neither flatten Scripture into bare chronicle nor abandon it for invention.

An early historical witness to this reading is Origen. In On First Principles IV.13, he appeals to Paul’s two-covenants interpretation to show that Scripture can bear spiritual meaning.10 His observation here concerns the apostle’s way of reading; it does not make Origen’s wider speculative teaching the Church’s doctrine. The governing witness remains Paul’s own argument, rooted in promise and fulfilled in Christ.

St Augustine reads the two births as a contrast between human capacity and divine gift. In the promised birth, he says, “a divine kindness comes to light.”11 This does not make ordinary birth unworthy of God’s care. It shows why the promised family exists: God is kind and faithful, and His heirs cannot manufacture His future.

Children of Promise and the Severe Word (Galatians 4:28-31)

28 Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. 29 But, as he who was born according to the flesh then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now. 30 Nevertheless what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.” 31 So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free.

Paul now names the congregation: “we … are children of promise.” This is the center of the whole passage. Christian identity is received before it is defended. God fulfills His promise in Christ, unites believers to His Son, and gives the Spirit who makes their adoption a living prayer. The Galatians do not need another condition to turn them into heirs. They need to remain in the life already given by the Father through the Son and in the Spirit.

Verse 29 describes the flesh-born son as persecuting the Spirit-born son. Brenton’s Septuagint describes Ishmael “sporting with Isaac” in Genesis 21:9. Paul’s “persecuted” is an apostolic interpretation of the hostility, applied to his present crisis.12

The pressure in Galatia gives Paul’s application its force. Teachers are seeking to place promise-born Gentile believers under circumcision as a necessary boundary of inheritance. What appears to promise fuller membership would actually deny the sufficiency of what God has already done in Christ. The flesh-versus-Spirit contrast is therefore not body against soul. It is humanly secured status against the life created by God’s promise and Spirit.

Then comes the hard sentence: “Cast out the bondwoman and her son.” In Genesis, a vulnerable woman and child are expelled, yet God continues to hear and preserve them. Paul does not explicitly identify whom or what the Galatians must cast out. His stated rationale is heirship: “the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.”13 Genesis 21:10 names Sarah’s “my son Isaac”; Paul writes “the son of the freewoman,” bringing the inheritance contrast directly to bear on the Church.14

Christians may not turn this verse into permission to despise or expel any people, or any vulnerable person. Paul is not handing the Church a list of disposable people. He calls believers to refuse a basis of belonging that would enslave those whom Christ has freed. The next sentence in the letter gives the direction: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free” (Galatians 5:1).

Chrysostom notes that the decisive clause concerns inheritance: “but that he should not be heir.”15 The question is what gives the Galatians their standing. God’s promise cannot remain the source of heirship while an imposed badge is treated as necessary to complete it.

Freedom therefore has a positive form. It is freedom to receive rather than manufacture one’s standing, freedom to obey without bargaining for worth, freedom to serve without needing superiority, and freedom to reject enslaving teaching without making an enemy of the people caught within it. The child of promise can be firm because the inheritance depends on God’s faithfulness.

The Church’s Voice in Worship ⛪

On Kiahk 30, the second day of the Nativity, the Church reads Galatians 4:19-5:1 alongside John 1:1-13 at the Liturgy.16 Having celebrated the Son born of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, she hears of the life He gives those who receive Him. The free Jerusalem bears children whose life comes from God, not from pedigree or pressure.

Chrysostom sees Isaac’s birth as the work of God’s effective promise: “the Word of God fashioned Him.”17 He then pictures God’s word working through baptismal water “as in a sort of womb.”18 Isaac’s promised birth, the Word’s Incarnation, and our regeneration are distinct, but together they turn us from manufactured guarantees toward the life God gives.

The Katameros of the Holy Pascha appoints Isaiah 19:19-25 at the Eleventh Hour of Great Thursday, with its promise of an altar to the Lord in Egypt.19 For the Church of Alexandria, this is a reason for gratitude, never a claim of ethnic superiority. The God who sees the afflicted Egyptian receives Egypt’s worship; no birthplace places a person beyond His mercy.

Spiritual Fruit 🍇

When belonging feels conditional

The Galatians were being taught that God’s promise needed a humanly secured guarantee: circumcision as necessary proof of heirship. The same fear appears when we believe, “God will truly receive me, keep me, or use me only if I never fail, remain impressive, or earn a leader’s approval.” A good discipline, family heritage, or ministry calling then becomes proof that we deserve a place rather than a gift lived in gratitude.

Chrysostom reassures Gentile believers that birth by promise, not physical descent, makes them Abraham’s kindred.20 The promise has not arrived too late for you. God makes children where no human pedigree could create them.

Write down the condition you believe you must satisfy in order to belong, then name what it produces: comparison, hidden failure, overwork, or bargaining in prayer. Bring that false condition to confession. Before one discipline this week, pray: “Father, You have made me Your child in Christ. Let this obedience grow from gratitude, not from a bargain for belonging.” Faithful obedience remains, but it no longer has to purchase the Father’s recognition.

When you use Scripture to confirm the decision you already want

The Galatians wanted the authority of the Law, but Paul asked whether they had heard it. The same failure occurs when we collect verses for a position while refusing the passage that exposes our pride, our harshness, or our need to control. Scripture becomes a badge rather than a voice.

Choose one passage you often use in an argument and read the paragraphs around it slowly. Ask what the text corrects in you before deciding what it proves about someone else. Hearing the Law begins when God’s word is permitted to judge the reader.

When a hard text makes contempt feel righteous

Hagar is an enslaved woman before Paul’s argument makes her a figure. Jewish people are not the bondwoman’s children to be despised, and verse 30 does not identify vulnerable people as disposable. Religious fear can seize a biblical contrast and turn it into permission to reject a person while calling the rejection faithfulness. Paul’s stated issue is heirship: whether Christ’s promise is sufficient, or whether an imposed condition will be treated as necessary for belonging.

Refuse the enslaving claim without discarding the human being caught beneath it. When this passage brings a person or group to mind, name the teaching or demand you believe is enslaving and test that claim carefully before God. Protect anyone being harmed, repent of contempt, and pray for the people involved by name. Christian firmness guards freedom in Christ while honoring the dignity of Hagar, Jewish people, and every vulnerable person whom severe religious language can place at risk.

When you are trying to force an outcome that only God can give

Sarah’s barrenness and Isaac’s birth expose the exhaustion beneath control. In family life, ministry, work, or prayer, we may pressure people, manipulate timing, or seize a visible guarantee because waiting on God feels unbearable. Human faithfulness has real work to do, but it cannot manufacture the promise.

Name one outcome you are trying to force. Complete the next faithful action that belongs to you, then stop where obedience ends. Pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, keep me faithful without making me controlling. Give what only Your promise can give.”

When freedom requires a firm refusal

Paul’s severe language exposes an enslaving claim that cannot be treated as a harmless option: Christ’s promise is insufficient unless another badge or demand completes it. That claim can appear in a parish, family, or ministry whenever one class of believer is only conditionally welcome, another person’s conscience must be controlled, or fear is used to secure religious conformity.

Name the claim clearly and place beside it Paul’s confession: “we are … children of promise.” Bring your own fear and anger to prayer and confession so that firmness does not become contempt. Then take the next truthful step: decline the coercive demand, seek wise pastoral counsel, protect anyone being harmed, or establish a boundary that refuses bondage without treating a person as disposable.

Footnotes

  1. Greek wording and morphology of Galatians 4:21, including hypo nomon, ton nomon, and akouete: biblehub.com. See also Balla, pages 125-127: indieskriflig.org.za. ↩

  2. Genesis 16:13; Isaiah 19:19, 25 (NKJV): biblegateway.com and biblegateway.com. ↩

  3. Galatians 4:23, kata sarka and di’ epangelias: biblehub.com. ↩

  4. Greek text analysis of allēgoroumena in Galatians 4:24: biblehub.com. Balla discusses “spoken” and “interpreted allegorically” on pages 123-124: indieskriflig.org.za. ↩

  5. Greek text analysis of systoichei in Galatians 4:25 and the NPNF editorial correction to a geographical-adjacency reading: biblehub.com and ccel.org. ↩

  6. Greek wording eis douleian gennōsa in Galatians 4:24-25: biblehub.com and biblehub.com. See Balla, pages 120-125, for Paul’s literal and figurative slavery vocabulary: indieskriflig.org.za. ↩

  7. Galatians 4:26, readings with and without pantōn: biblehub.com. ↩

  8. Isaiah 54:1, Brenton’s Septuagint: ebible.org; Galatians 4:27: biblehub.com. ↩

  9. St John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, Chapter IV, on Galatians 4:24, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 13: ccel.org. ↩

  10. Origen, On First Principles, Book IV, §13, in the presentation translated from Rufinus’s Latin: newadvent.org. ↩

  11. St Augustine, City of God 15.2, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 2: newadvent.org. ↩

  12. Brenton’s Septuagint, Genesis 21:9: ebible.org; Galatians 4:29: biblehub.com. ↩

  13. Galatians 4:30: biblehub.com; Péter Balla, “Paul’s Use of Slavery Imagery in the Hagar Allegory,” pp. 132-133: indieskriflig.org.za. ↩

  14. Genesis 21:10, Brenton’s Septuagint: ebible.org; Galatians 4:30: biblehub.com. ↩

  15. St John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, Chapter IV, on Galatians 4:29-30, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 13: ccel.org. ↩

  16. Coptic lectionary, Kiahk 30, second day of the Nativity, Liturgy: Galatians 4:19-5:1 and John 1:1-13: copticchurch.net. ↩

  17. St John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, Chapter IV, on Galatians 4:23: ccel.org. ↩

  18. St John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, Chapter IV, on Galatians 4:28, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 13: ccel.org. ↩

  19. The Katameros of the Holy Pascha, St Mary Ottawa, English eBook, Lent 1734 A.M. / 2018 A.D., Great Thursday, Eleventh Hour, p. 465, Isaiah 19:19-25. ↩

  20. St John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, Chapter IV, on Galatians 4:23: ccel.org. ↩

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