The passage contrasts two types of proselytes: the legal proselyte and the spiritual proselyte. The one becomes part of Abraham’s family by conventional conversion, the other through faith in Messiah, the promised seed of Abraham, in whom all nations find blessing. The passage does not contrast the Old Testament against the New Testament or the Old Covenant with the New Covenant. It does not equate Judaism and Torah with slavery, nor does it pit Christians against Jews.
It means that if you are a Jewish believer , you should be proud of being Jewish because you are a child of Abraham, legally, physically, and spiritually. It means that if you are a Gentile believer, you, too, are part of the people, a spiritual son of Abraham, and that is remarkable – miraculous even. You are a child of the promise that God made to Abraham so long ago.
-D. Thomas Lancaster
The Holy Epistle to the Galatians
“Sermon Twenty-Two: Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, and Ishmael (Galatians 4:21-31)”
This is just a sample of how Lancaster’s view of Paul’s epistle to the Galatians presents a fresh and startlingly different understanding of the apostle’s message to the Gentile believers. This book takes Paul’s letter, virtually line-by-line, and re-interprets it from what most Christians would see as a radically different perspective. The book’s subtitle, “Sermons on a Messianic Jewish Approach” reveals the specific lens by which Lancaster views the letter and the stance from which he presents his argument: that Paul was supporting the unique covenant identity for the Jewish believer and at the same time, was instructing the non-Jewish disciples that they could have the same access to God, though the Messiah, without converting to Judaism.
But let me back up a minute.
Lancaster’s book is based on a series of 26 lectures or sermons he delivered in 2008 to Beth Immanuel, his community of faith, in Hudson, Wisconsin. It’s not unusual for Lancaster, a long-time contributor of books and other educational text to First Fruits of Zion (FFOZ), to “mine” his previous works for the sake of a new publication (for instance, Toby Janicki’s book Tefillin used some of Lancaster’s previous writing as a basis). Since each chapter represents one sermon in a series, I got an “episodic” feel as I moved from chapter to chapter, particularly in the first part of the book. I was also pleased that Lancaster’s ability to create the illusion that the reader is in the situation being described, was present in his current book. As I read through the chapters, I felt as if I were listening to Paul in one of the churches of Galatia, struggling with the issues he was trying to communicate, and experiencing the conflict between his teaching and the “influencers”.
As I mentioned before, this isn’t your typical Christian commentary on the Book of Galatians. Lancaster, using his knowledge of the Greek language, history, and accessing authoritative scholarly sources, “refactors” Paul’s letter into an almost completely different form, reflecting the Messianic Jewish viewpoint on Paul in general as well as FFOZ’s perspective in particular. There were a number of times when Lancaster would present the traditional Christian interpretation of a set of verses and then say something like, “this interpretation isn’t acceptable in Messianic Judaism”. I kind of wish he didn’t say it that way.
Sure, the focus of this book is to illustrate how Messianic Judaism views Paul’s letter in a dramatically different way, through its own “looking glass”, in order to understand his message in a way that makes more sense to both Jewish and non-Jewish disciples of the Jewish Messiah, but unfortunately, it could also be seen by a Christian reader as Lancaster just making the text say what he wants it to say to match his theology. The real value that I find in this book, (and many of FFOZ’s other materials) is in how it peels away almost twenty centuries of unchanging, set-in-stone, Christian theology and lets the reader see credible (and even very likely) alternatives to what Paul could have been saying. Questioning assu