The Heir - Galatians 4:1-7

4:1-7 - I swear, Paul makes some excellent points in chapter 4, but man if I didn’t have to go 4 different places to find them. This will probably be more of my paraphrasing what he’s saying because I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Now that Paul has shown all saints that their background doesn’t matter, he starts to explain their relationship to God. The IM sets it up, saying, “There are some ways in which our covenant relationship with God is like the relationship of a servant to his master. But Paul taught the Galatians that our relationship with God is better understood as that of a child to a father.” This is not really a concept that I understand so I struggle to comprehend a male leader having a vested interest in your success who does what he can to help you be successful. I’ve never had that so it doesn’t make sense to me, so I don’t really find that definition of God to be helpful for me. The IM takes it from the perspective kind of like that of an orphan, just as a kid who doesn’t know who they are or where they come from and who basically gets to choose their lineage and inheritance. The IM says that Paul explained “to the Galatians that being a ‘son’ in the gospel covenant was far better than being a servant to the false gods they had worshipped before they accepted the truth.” This might be a difficult concept for some people to accept because they have such screwed up family dynamics. If someone has a father who abused them or other family members who traumatized them, then being in a “family” with someone is not as appealing as it would be to others who had loving and happy families. Today, this would be similar to the concept of “you’ll be happier doing what God says, even if you don’t understand it, than you would be just doing whatever you want.” That’s illogical to most people because doing whatever they want sounds like the best course of action they can do. And a lot of times, people resist being “obedient” to a concept they don’t completely understand. But in the example Paul gives, people don’t understand that they are already “worshipping” or being obedient to an urge or an addiction or a flawed understanding. So really, what it comes down to, is “doing whatever you want” isn’t an ideology of freedom, because those “what you want” comes from a place inside yourself that has been built in response to a biological need for survival. Let’s take some examples from the commandments. It is our natural urge to lie when we feel like there will be consequences for the truth. But lying usually ends up getting us into trouble eventually. It is our natural tendency to develop negative feelings when someone has what we want. By Paul’s logic, having those negative feelings is “doing whatever we want” or being “in bondage under the elements of the world.” Maybe Paul’s statement about the elements of the world, is referencing the natural man or our biological urges. Paul is saying that living as an “heir” to a God we don’t fully understand is better than being a slave to our natural state of being. That’s an interesting statement that I personally agree with but I can see how some people might not. Once we choose to follow God, Paul says that the “heir” which is us, while still underage, meaning still in this mortality, must be taught by “tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father.” The article on this chapter from gospeldoctrine.com comments, “The heir is the children of Israel. The tutors and governors are the schoolmasters or the Law of Moses which was to prepare the heir for the inheritance of the new and everlasting covenant – made possible only by the redemption of Christ. Bruce R. McConkie, ‘Israel under the law of Moses was being trained and prepared for the coming of Christ so they could receive the adoption of sons. Similarly: though we are heirs of God, destined to inherit all that the Father hath, yet as long as we are in mortality, we are under tutors and governors; we are being schooled and trained and prepared to use our inheritance wisely when it is finally received.’” Anciently, the law of Moses was meant to prepare a people to receive Christ when he came, and that worked for some groups, such as the descendants of Lehi in the Americas, but it didn’t work as well as intended for other groups, such as the Jews. When Christ came, some of the people were ready to receive Him, and many others were not, but he came so that all who were ready to accept the gospel, at any point in their journey would be adopted as an heir of the Father. That’s pretty prestigious station. I wouldn’t consider myself an “heir” if I didn’t have any positive inheritance coming my way. I can’t think of anyone who would reject an offer of anything positive if they agreed to become the “heir” of someone. But usually those inheritances have conditions, and sometimes they are crazy, but most of the times, the conditions are placed on the heir so that they can become what the benefactor wants them to be, which is usually a positive image of themselves, or at least that’s what I’ve seen on tv. The IM makes an interesting connection, saying, “In the parable of the prodigal son, the Savior taught that our Father in Heaven wants us to be His children in the gospel covenant. The parable teaches that the wayward son believed he had become permanently unworthy to be called his father’s son and asked to be his servant, but the father accepted him back as his son.” This might also be a difficult concept for many people to understand because so many of us were raised in a way that we were never offered anything good and if we were it came with serious strings attached to which there were serious and sensitive strings attached. In this way, if someone who has family trust issues, which I feel is most people, then we would see God’s offer of “just do what I say and I’ll make you happy” seems like a ‘too good to be true” proposition and either not worth our efforts, or an actual trap in which we will be caught up in a scenario where we will be severely injured if we are not perfect in our actions or if we get in the way of the ego of the God who’s offering us this. So many of us have spent our impressionable years being hurt in ways that don’t make sense to us. For instance, our parents or caregivers hurt us and then when they treated us ok, it was very fragile. As a result, we have formed layers of defense mechanisms around ourselves. These defense mechanisms can be standoffishness, the inability to trust others, being skeptical of anyone who offers us anything. And once we accept their offer, even if it is legit, we very often will sabotage it because our brains have been rewired in such a way that, subconsciously, it makes sense to destroy something yourself before it hurts you. It’s a really interesting but sad concept.