Galatians 5:1, commentary and pictures

Stand fast in the liberty Christ gives means holding firm in gospel freedom instead of returning to trust in ceremonial observance as essential to salvation while faith in Christ and obedience are set aside. That liberty is entire dependence on Christ for salvation and freedom from the condemnation of the law, not freedom to transgress God's moral law or to live without restraint. God's law itself is a law of liberty, while the yoke of bondage is sin, Satan's deceptive control, and human traditions and exactions that burden conscience and obscure the law's true duties. Standing fast is full surrender of will and way to God, walking by faith in His word rather than feeling, and living in harmony with His will in loving obedience bearing the fruit of the Spirit. It is kept daily by moral courage for truth, refusing to be controlled by another mind or entangled again by arbitrary human authority, debt, or corrupting habit, and by loving service to one another instead of strife and selfish ambition.

Verse Setting and Terms

The appeal was addressed to converts in Galatia who were being pulled back into keeping the ceremonial system as if it were necessary for salvation, while trust in Christ and obedience to the Ten Commandments were being set aside as matters of little importance. To stand firm in the freedom Christ supplies is to gather the valuable wheat, and to fail to stand firm is to gather weeds instead. That freedom is the freedom once enjoyed in Christ, and to lose it is to slide back into the entanglements of the world.

The greatest joy is to know that converts are standing firm in the freedom of the gospel, and the greatest desire for them is that Christ be formed within as the hope of glory. Christ's atoning grace is what makes people free, and those who return to the gospel are to stay steadfast in that freedom. Such steadfastness goes with complete surrender and a genuine personal experience of God, and it is shown in lives that bear the fruit of the Spirit.

Freedom in Christ is release from spiritual bondage into the standing of God's children, accompanied by baptism and a new life devoted to God, with rejection of every influence that would hold in bondage and a claiming of liberty in the Lord. It comes through a spiritual change that turns the perverse nature into a new life in harmony with God and at peace with God. To remain in bondage to Satan and under the old person of sin, with a corrupt carnal heart, is to lack that liberty, and apparent success in persuading others to accept truth is no proof of acceptance with God while that bondage continues. Those who have lost liberty by sliding back may recover by looking to Jesus and accepting His word in faith, and then they will present a changed life and character revealing faith working by love and purifying the soul, which helps keep fellow believers from sliding back.

Nature of True Liberty

Freedom in Christ is surrender of will and way to God without reserving anything or compromising with self, being emptied of self and losing sight of self so that Jesus fills the soul instead. That surrender ends talking of self, flattering self, pitying self and extolling self, and it enables service in God's work rather than reliance on one's own power. The one made free clings to Jesus as the only hope and helper, talks of Jesus and of His love and His power, gives a testimony that is not stale or spiritless, and knows how to pray in the Spirit.

Standing firm in the liberty Christ has given is walking by faith in God's word and promises rather than relying on feelings, sight, or a certain state of feeling to know one is accepted. It means believing the Lord wants to save and that the believer is His child, resting the case with the Lord, believing His Word, consecrating anew to God, being loyal and true to Thus saith the Lord, and walking by faith and not by sight. It is a privilege of perfect faith even when the path is marked by crosses, growing in grace and in knowledge of the truth, letting faith rather than feeling be the criterion, refusing to try to unravel mysteries regarding life and the Deity, not depending on excitement, and not losing confidence in Jesus Christ as leader. It is lived out by talking faith, rejoicing in hope, keeping the praise of God in the heart continually, and trusting in the Lord to see His salvation.

The liberty Christ gives is freedom, light and joy, not bondage, with abundant provision of mercy, grace and peace through the Comforter establishing God's kingdom in the soul. To treat the truth as bondage proves the heart has never tasted that the Lord is good, while the soul that cherishes the love of Christ is free and undivided and yearns wholly after God. Such a soul goes to the Lord Jesus rather than to men to know duty, searches the Word of God to find the standard set up, and finds in Christ Jesus all that is satisfying. This liberty is a tested and proved transformation of character worked by the Holy Spirit, seen when men bound by tobacco and liquor are restored and made free, brought out of the bondage of the law into the liberty of the gospel.

Freedom in Christ is freedom from bondage in which the will is in harmony with God's will because the fruit of the Spirit is present, so the believer walks in liberty and loves the commandments in loving obedience. God's truth when lived and practiced is not burdensome slavery but emancipation in Christ Jesus our Lord, and believers who enjoy the truth because they practice it display that liberty to others and give the impression that Christ has emancipated them. Walking humbly with God and working in the spirit of Jesus Christ lays heavy burdens on the great Burden-bearer and brings assurance of God's presence, triumph in His love from beginning to end, and a signal manifestation of His glory felt as a foretaste of Christ's mercy, love and compassion.

Life with Christ is liberty, peace and love, while life in Satan's service is bondage and tyranny. Christ calls people to a pure and happy life of humble, truthful obedience, offering friendship, companionship and a future inheritance, so that choosing Him now is choosing the liberty He gives. God gives strength to those who stand wholly with Him and remain in the liberty He gives, freeing them from bondage to use their abilities in His service, speak words that encourage others, and bear a clear, important message from God. That standing means carrying through matters as under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit and remaining unmoved by all the subterfuges of Satan to bind yokes upon God's people.

Liberty and God's Law

God's law is a law of liberty, not a yoke of bondage, and to present its requirements as bondage misrepresents Scripture and can turn people away from obedience to God. The verse does not mean that the gospel frees people from the requirements of God's law, and the liberty Christ gives is wrongly contrasted with obedience when the law is portrayed as a grievous yoke and freedom under the gospel is portrayed as freedom from the law. Christ's freedom is not freedom to transgress God's law or to reject moral restraint, and to call the law or the Ten Commandments a yoke of bondage falsely presents transgression as liberty and mistakes liberty for license. Treating the law's requirements as bondage undermines the faith of young people in the Bible and leaves them without a sure guide, while those who reject the law are enslaved to sin.

What Christ frees people from is not God's law but a yoke of bondage made of confused interpretations, added human traditions, and needless rites and restrictions that burdened life, obscured the essential duties of the law, and made the Sabbath almost unendurable. Jesus opposed those human exactions while honoring the law and teaching obedience to its precepts, and God's commandments by contrast are just, not unreasonable or selfish restrictions, and can be consistently kept by all without senseless usages and clumsy restrictions. When the law is loaded down with added requirements it becomes an exacting, absorbing power, a yoke of bondage that leads enemies of God's law to conclude it cannot be obligatory because no one can keep it. The same result follows when church work is managed by concentrating all thought in one direction and creating needless labor and expense.

The freedom Christ gives is entire dependence upon Him for salvation and liberty from the condemnation of the law, not lawlessness and not doing away with the law itself, and keeping the law is not falling from grace. To claim that release from condemnation means the law is abolished and that law-keepers have fallen from grace is presumption, a fatal error lying close beside the precious truth, by which Satan works to secure homage. The verse does not call the Ten Commandments a yoke to be cast off, yet blind leaders misuse the phrase to teach that the law is not binding, and willingly ignorant hearers accept it because carnal hearts are not in unison with the law and want freedom to sin, charging their unhappiness to its prohibitions. Seeking freedom and happiness by getting rid of the law is the devil's deception, which leaves men in guilt and does not improve their condition, while the law remains God's mirror to show true character so that sin and impurity may be put away and righteousness worked.

Calling the law a yoke of bondage is Satan's own charge against God, repeated by wicked men who resist the Spirit. Those who reject allegiance to God and obedience to His law repeat Satan's rebellion and cannot belong to the heavenly family, while sin is transgression of the law, those who commit sin and reject the law belong to the devil, and they stand under the enmity put between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, from which Christ works as substitute and mediator to win people from Satan's service. God's holy moral law proclaimed from Sinai in terrible grandeur still stands, and Christ came to exalt it and make it honorable. To pour contempt on it as an old rickety dead and buried law not deserving a gravestone, an old thunder and lightning law, or an old bloody Jewish law is blasphemy against the Most High that pleases Satan and is the great swelling speech of the man of sin. Tried by Thou shalt have no other gods before Me, it is no type or passing shadow but binding law that leads to the one living God and forbids looking to other gods for help, reverence and adoration, and it is only counted a yoke because its Thou shalt interferes with the will of man.

In the no-law teaching the verse is taken to mean that the law is a yoke of bondage so there is no law and no Sabbath at all to be kept, and that if the law is kept there is a fall from grace. In that same teaching it means liberty from the restraint and condemnation of the tenth commandment against coveting and from keeping the commandments at all, so that the commandment is a restriction of liberty and a terrible yoke of bondage, obedience puts a person under bondage and makes him fall from grace, and all one has to do is believe, believe.

Forms of the Yoke

The yoke of bondage is Satan binding men and women to his plans and fastening them before they are aware of it. He works through deceptive controversy to draw people into his plans, and he stays wide-awake to keep his controversy going in his own way after his own plan. He presses it until the harvest is past and the summer is ended and leaders under him are lost with those deceived by him. God therefore calls His people to take heed, to come out of that deceptive controversy, and to hold fast to the freedom Christ has given rather than be bound again.

Evil habits, strengthened by Satan's temptations, hold people like firm fetters and keep them from standing in the freedom God gives. Those so held need help to break free.

Christ has made men free to stand free in God as free moral agents with moral independence to exercise their God-given ability. They are not to be bought or sold, not to serve any man through fear of what he can do, not to depend on another man's conscience, not to sit at any man's footstool to obey his orders, and not to exchange their own judgment for another's. They must not be entangled again by fellow laborers exalting themselves, forcing others to accept their terms and come under their control, disregarding experienced judgment, denying independent judgment, narrowing the work to their own plans, setting on foot plans that restrict the liberty of workers, trammelling by restrictions those who should stand free, claiming jurisdiction over intellect and conscience, manipulating others for selfish purposes, and crowding down and dictating to those God is using while grasping benefit for themselves. No man is to order, dictate, control, discipline, judge, or keep under surveillance another man's duty and work, and because some have moved unadvisedly or made mistakes through lack of judgment, no bands, bars, yokes, and rulings of fellow men are to be put upon all requiring them to ask counsel and permission of men how they shall move. Conscience is to be controlled by no power on earth, but will and mind are to be placed where the Holy Spirit can reach them and work by its faintest whispers, with each left free before God to be taught by His Spirit, to talk with God in prayer, to seek the Lord with heart and mind and spirit, to watch unto prayer, to follow the Lord's instructions, to hold fast profession of faith and religious principles, to honor the cross, to stand in God with Christian fortitude, and to be given every opportunity to improve his gift to win souls to Christ. Ministers and teachers may place their own necks under yokes if they choose, but others must never place yokes on them, nor bind about or circumscribe any man or council of men unless there is decided evidence they are worked by the Holy Spirit, for all belongs to God who made men free and will not let the world convert them.

Because Christ has made men free, men in God's institutions are to be free men and take their stand as God's property, not to be bought or sold under any circumstances and refusing to be bound by Satan's plans and brought under a yoke of bondage. They are to serve as volunteers who follow Christ just as the fishermen left their nets and Matthew left the receipt of customs, leaving behind past practices and former ways of working to unite with Christ and learn His methods and plans for the salvation of souls. God leads His people into a right kind of order that advances His work without restricting or hindering it. Following the light He gives, even when the outcome is not yet clear, leads to further light and liberty rather than confusion.

Believers had been made fearful and unable to assert their liberty by fanatics who deceived and oppressed them, and when the fanatics were checked they were freed from that bondage and rejoiced in the Lord. Being free now means no longer being controlled by another person or deceived by unsanctified theories and false doctrines. It also means refusing the yoke of leaders who promise liberty while themselves serving sin, whose claims do not make their teaching true.

Those who reject the church's delegated authority may nevertheless place themselves under a yoke of bondage by submitting to the rules of a manmade order. Liberty includes freedom of conscience, so faith must not be imposed by force. The gospel, rather than compulsion, is to correct error and guide people back to truth. Christ ransomed people to make them free servants of Jesus Christ, calling for obedience to Christ as spiritual Leader and for seeking to save as many people as possible and bring them to Him.

The liberty wherewith Christ makes free is true independence, having a mind and taste and judgment of one's own. To eagerly take up the entirely unnecessary burden of following fashion is to willingly accept the yoke of bondage and to be held in shackles as truly as any slave. Those who do so falsely talk of independence without knowing its first principles.

Unnecessary debt can become a burden that restricts those serving in an institution, so they should exercise caution and stand free of it. Becoming a bondman through debt and money-demanding schemes is a species of slavery that imperils religious experience, weakens influence in religious work, and proves a curse and not a favor. Standing fast means keeping the consciousness of freedom in Christ Jesus and refusing to be entangled again, becoming a Bible student, preaching the Word, weeding cheap work from conversation, maintaining the spiritual tone of Christian character at the highest standard, working in God's lines, preserving a healthful wholesome influence every day as a vessel unto honor, living as a laborer together with God with life one with Christ through saving grace, and carrying peace, happiness, and joy with Christ's abiding joy making joy full while living in the light of God's presence.

The liberty Christ gives is to be kept in marriage by refusing to be entangled again with the yoke of bondage. A wife should keep her soul free before God and not bind herself under a yoke as a bondslave by giving up her own identity to follow out her husband's ideas and yield to arbitrary dictatorial demands. Her husband is not her conscience, so she must maintain a clear conscience before God and resist attempts to intimidate or control her. A husband has duties that he can and should perform for his wife, but it is not his duty to discipline her, to teach her his ways, to blend her identity with his, or to control her movements. A marriage that becomes control and forced compliance is a grievous yoke to bear and contrary to that liberty.

Standing Fast Daily

Holding firm means staying free from darkness and error into truth and the last message of mercy, rejoicing in the truth and separating from those daily taking in new errors. Neither young nor old are to attend assemblies where deadly poison to the soul and human commandments as doctrines are taught, nor encourage them by presence, nor throw away time listening to fables. The mind is to be occupied with present truth and seeking wisdom for more thorough knowledge of present position, so as to give a meek scriptural reason of hope and be fitted to stand in the day of the Lord, since a mind filled with false doctrines pressed upon it cannot dwell on fitting truth. Going voluntarily to listen to error when God has not sent displeases God, causes angels to cease watchful care, and leaves one to be buffeted, darkened and weakened by the enemy and his evil angels until the surrounding light is contaminated with darkness, and only when God sends where error is forced home by power of the will does He keep.

The call is to stand free in Christ and break the yoke of binding influences by determined effort against fear of rejection that keeps silent about wrong actions, words and principles. It is moral courage to stand firm for the truth as it is in Jesus and to hold fast the beginning of confidence unto the end, resting on being bought at an infinite price by the Son of God. That liberty is freedom from being led away from truth to receive fables, from building with wood, hay and stubble that will be utterly consumed, and from being held in control by another mind in fear to speak. It requires clear spiritual discernment and constant guard, so that those with important responsibilities such as physicians are not deceived when dangers not now discerned break upon them.

Standing fast reaches speech, for unprofitable words become to the speaker a yoke of bondage, while walking in the liberty of the Spirit is witnessed by choice profitable words that prove freedom. The call is to break every yoke and stand free in the liberty Christ gives, praising the Lord. This freedom and peace are not gained through much talk or feelings founded on imagination, but require laying down the things that cause wretchedness and ceasing speech that dishonors the Lord.

Those already free and those to rise into it now are to lift up their heads and rejoice in God, praising Him freely and fully because praise is fitting for the upright. The ground is redemption by His most precious blood and the soon coming everlasting salvation. Standing in that liberty includes being at peace among brethren.

Believers are called into liberty for practical godliness in loving one another and not striving with one another, resisting the pride, selfish ambition, contention and dissension that Satan originated. This liberty must not be used unlawfully by indulging in corrupt practices, but must be guarded by avoiding anything that creates contention, dissension and differences of feeling, and by serving one another in love with Christian affection. Freedom means workers belong to God, who has bought them and is to guide and direct their service. They should not bind themselves by contracts to serve for a fixed number of years in an institution or under a medical association, especially when such a pledge could hinder going where God calls to carry the message.

Christ-given liberty is not to be surrendered for the sake of fellowship with others, but believers should act with a clear conscience before heaven and remain meek and humble without accepting burdens or compromising that liberty. Christ's freedom is not a reason to cast off God's truth or its reproofs, for those who treated close testimonies as a yoke of bondage had long been unconsecrated in heart and threw off the yoke while keeping their corrupt ways. The warning applies to separating from those who oppose the truth rather than mistaking rejection of reproof for Christian liberty.

Christ has freed people from oppression of conscience to stand firm rather than be carried back into error and darkness, yet that freedom does not spare conflict. When they obey God and uphold truth their lives rebuke sin, and opposition and persecution arise as error contends against truth. Those who have lost liberty by backsliding into the entanglements of the world may recover by looking to Jesus and accepting His Word in faith. They then present a different life and character revealing faith working by love and purifying the soul, which helps keep brethren from backsliding. Standing fast calls for a complete break from the yoke of bondage and a bold stand for what is right.