KenH
Well-Known Member
Excerpt from Robert Hawker's "Poor Man's New Testament Commentary" on Galatians 4:1-2
"Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father."
The similitude of a school, is admirably chosen, to represent
the tutorage of the law. And the bondage under the elements
of the world; bears a strict connection also, with the discipline,
of souls, under age. Men who are in the bondage of sin, or
the bondage of the world; or the bondage of the law, which
prescribes rules of life, but affords no help to obey them:
strikingly show the awful state of unawakened nature, which
sees indeed the holiness of the precept, but finds no power in
nature to live up to it. Such is the rigor of the law, which
takes every debtor by the throat with unrelenting severity,
saying, pay me that thou owest! And, in point of failure, (as
must be the case of every child of Adam,) nothing but
bondage fears, and terror, follow; expecting with daily dread,
the correction which must come. Oh! the sad bondages of the
elements of the world!
"Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father."
The similitude of a school, is admirably chosen, to represent
the tutorage of the law. And the bondage under the elements
of the world; bears a strict connection also, with the discipline,
of souls, under age. Men who are in the bondage of sin, or
the bondage of the world; or the bondage of the law, which
prescribes rules of life, but affords no help to obey them:
strikingly show the awful state of unawakened nature, which
sees indeed the holiness of the precept, but finds no power in
nature to live up to it. Such is the rigor of the law, which
takes every debtor by the throat with unrelenting severity,
saying, pay me that thou owest! And, in point of failure, (as
must be the case of every child of Adam,) nothing but
bondage fears, and terror, follow; expecting with daily dread,
the correction which must come. Oh! the sad bondages of the
elements of the world!