Two Women, Two Covenants, One Question — Galatians 4:21–31 | Season 1, Episode 10

Are you managing your spiritual life — or receiving it?

In this episode of the Set Free Stay Free Bible study podcast, host Matt Dawson works through one of the most creative moments in Paul's entire letter. To close out his argument in Galatians chapter 4, Paul reaches back into one of the most familiar stories in all of Jewish scripture — Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac — and turns it into a picture of two covenants, two ways of living, and two very different destinations.

One child came from human effort. One came from God's promise. And Paul's point is as direct as it gets: you are not the child of effort. You are the child of promise. So why are you living like you still have to earn it?

Using the SOAP method (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer), Matt unpacks why this ancient story speaks so clearly to the modern struggle of trusting God versus trusting ourselves — even when we've slapped a spiritual label on our own agenda. The difference between slavery and freedom, Paul says, is not behavior. It's trust.

This Galatians Bible study is for anyone who keeps trying to help God out — and wonders why it never quite feels like freedom.

In this episode:

• Why Paul uses Hagar and Sarah to illustrate two covenants
• What Ishmael and Isaac represent in Paul's argument
• The difference between human effort and the child of promise
• Why "it can't be that simple" is exactly what Paul is pushing back against
• The thief on the cross — and what he knew that we often forget
• A closing prayer for releasing control and trusting God's grace

📖 Passage: Galatians 4:21–31 (New Living Translation)

🔍 Keywords: Galatians Bible study, Bible study podcast, SOAP method Bible study, Christian Bible study, Scripture-first Bible study, Set Free Stay Free, Matt Dawson, walking through the Bible, Christian discipleship podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

All right, in your spiritual life, are you living in a place of trying to manage and control things, or are you living in a way that in which you've just received something? Paul's going to talk about in this week's letter of Galatians about two women, two kids, two different covenants. One leads to slavery, one leads to promise. And the difference, believe it or not, is not behavior. It's not about obeying the law, it's about trust. Welcome to the Set Free, Stay Free, a Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Matt Dawson. Hopefully, you have your Bible with you. We are in episode 10 of our walkthrough Galatians. We're going to use the soap framework, scripture, observation, application, prayer. And I encourage you to have your own copy of God's Word or just listen along, maybe as you're watching this, to what we read together today. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for what you've given us in your word. May you reveal to us what you want us to observe and apply. And God, we are trusting you and you alone to do it. And we pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen. All right. This is episode 10. We are following chapter 4. Paul in the previous episode just talked about grieving for the people that are being led astray by false teachers. He wishes he could be there in person to share and have a better tone, he says. But I want to, he goes right into an illustration of the story for them. Let's go dive into verse 21 of chapter 4. Tell me, you who want to live under the law, do you know what the law actually says? The scripture says that Abraham had two sons, and one from his slave wife, and one from his freeborn wife. The son of the slave wife was born in a human attempt to bring about the fulfillment of God's promise. But the son of the freeborn wife was born as God's own fulfillment of his promise. These two women serve as an illustration of God's two covenants. The first woman, Hagar, represents Mount Sinai, where people received the law that enslaved them. And now Jerusalem is like Mount Sinai in Arabia, because she and her children live in slavery to the law. But the other woman, Sarah, represents the heavenly Jerusalem. She is the free woman, and she is our mother. As Isaiah said, Rejoice, O childless woman, you who have never given birth, break into joyful shout, you who have never been in labor. For the desolate woman now has more children than the woman who lives with her husband. I'm going to pause there because that's a really weird prophecy for you to pick up on. But here's what's happening. Again, I think I've shared this several times now. The Judaizers, the people who want the Gentiles to be circumcised, become slaves to the law, to just sort of follow in the things that seem right or feel right, especially to the Jewish believers. He's continuing to argue that that is not the freedom that came in Christ. And so the last four chapters, he just continues to hammer home your children of the promise, your children of the covenant. You are free in Christ. You are not supposed to be bound in slavery to the law. So he decides to give them, and I think hopefully you've picked up on this. He continues to give them Old Testament, Jewish scripture illustrations. Why? Number one, the Gentiles would have just been learning about some of these things because they were part of the Jewish scriptures and they would have never heard them before, except for maybe rumor. But the Jewish, the Judaizers, the Jewish followers, would all know these stories. And so he's bringing them together through something that God already gave in his holy word. And he says, I want to tell you this story about these two women and their children. He's talking about Hagar and Sarah, Abraham's uh wife, and I mean eventually marries Hagar, but uh was a maidservant of Sarah's. And he's talking about the way in which God promised Sarah a child. She wasn't having one fast enough, was very frustrated, and told Abraham to go sleep with her maidservant so that she could have a kid. And Sarah was really old, and it's a whole nother whole other element of the promise. But so Abraham does that, and they have a child, Ishmael. They end up having their actual child of promise, which is Isaac. And and all of a sudden, now Paul's going to take this Old Testament story and going to translate it into the Old Testament law, that there was a law given. Again, he already told us earlier in chapters, just as a placeholder, just as a guardian, we're not supposed to be in slavery to the law. And then he says, So there's this child out of human effort that that represents the law. And then there's this child of promise that represents the covenant that God made with Abraham because Abraham trusted in God. And so he says, it's all about this idea of trust. It's all about what are you and who are you trusting in? Are you trusting in yourself to manage and handle your spiritual destination and eternity and outcomes? Or are you trusting in the God who promised you freedom? That's, I mean, that's ultimately what he's getting around to. Again, just restating the point. Let's pick up in verse 28. He says, And you, dear brothers and sisters, are children of the promise like Isaac, but you are now being persecuted by those who want to keep the law, just as Ishmael, the child born of human effort, persecuted Isaac, and the child born by the power of the Spirit. But what do the scriptures say about that? I love this. He says, Get rid of the slave and her son, for the son of the slave woman will not share the inheritance with the free woman's son. So, dear brothers and sisters, you are not children of the slave woman. You are, we are children of the free woman. I think again, this is one of those easier passages to dissect because it's primarily driven around this story. But he wants to continue to come back to it's either going to be by your effort, human effort, that you can figure these things out, or it's going to be because God has figured it out for you, but you have to trust him. Like that's it. It's about trusting in his way, his plan, not about your own effort, not about your own desire to accomplish the things that you think. I mean, we've we paint spiritual things on our outcomes all the time. Well, God, I think, would want me to do this, and I think God would want me to have this, and I think God would want me to be fulfilled in this way. And we're going to continue to push that, that slap that God sticker on it and try to push it through in our own energy. And he's telling the Galatians, this is so much like the children of human effort versus the child of promise. He says, of course, the child of promise are now going to outnumber the child of human effort. But he goes on towards the end and says, similar to how Ishmael would pick on Isaac, right? This is just a story of them growing up. And Sarah would cast them out. They are not going to share in the inheritance of our of our of our son. Now, we we can read that in a pettiness of a mom, and you could you can feel bad for Hagar, and you can feel bad for Ishmael, even though God did take care of them. You can feel bad for them. But the reality is that Paul's grabbing this story and helping them understand look, there are people who are slave to the law because they want it to be their own effort. They want it to be that they brought something to the equation in their spiritual journey. It's not just all about God. And so they're slave to that, and they are now persecuting and causing problems and leaning heavily on the children of these Gentiles who are the children of promise who just received Christ because Paul said, you could just come and receive Christ and believe in God and Jesus would be yours. And they want to persecute them, they want to lean in and treat them poorly. And he says, just like the story of these two kids. He says, but just remember, one is cast out, one is not going to receive the promises of God, right? That's that's the reality. It's like one is going to be continue to be a reminder that it's all about you and it's all about your effort versus it being about God's. I had a great text conversation with a friend of mine uh a couple weeks ago. We were just talking about grace, and I think I actually pointed him to Galatians a couple of times. And uh and it was just funny because at some point, and this is a very honest conversation between me and a friend, and he totally knows he can be 100% brutally honest. And we were talking about grace, and at some point, I love that he just said, Look, it can't be that simple. It can't be. Sorry. Sorry, not sorry, can't be that simple. And we're texting back and forth because I'm actually on the other side of the country at this point, and we're texting, and I said, No, it's it's that simple. I mean, I hate to say it, but one of the great examples, Alistair Beck uh gives us a great example of the the the thief on the cross who shows up in heaven, and Peter and the angels start questioning him about all these theological things and the Jewish history things, and the guy knows none of it. And he says, Well, what are you doing in heaven? And the and the the thief on the cross says, The guy on the middle cross said I could come. That's it. You know, it's a great story. Look up Alistair Beck. He's the guy on the middle cross said I could come. That's the only reason I'm here. And sometimes, again, we struggle. If we are, if we have those inclinations, if we're struggling with trying to accomplish something, uh, again, we can even put spiritual labels on it. If we're trying to accomplish something, and and we're struggling because we really are leaning into our own effort. We're going to make it about us, even with the labels, spiritual labels of God on it, but it's never going to be about us, and we're enslaved to that. I think he, again, chapter three said, Why would you want to go back to the weak and useless principles of the law? But in the moment, in the in the when we're, you know, can't see the forest for the trees, when we're in there, we don't see them as use and weakness. We see them as like, well, yeah, but this is gonna get it done faster. This is gonna get it done on my timing, this is gonna get this accomplished in a way that I still feel good about it, versus understanding that everything is by God's grace, his provision, his grace, justification, sanctification, glorification. All of it is through the power of God, and again, through the covenant. We read about that a few episodes ago, the covenant of Abraham all the way through the New Testament, if he being fulfilled through Christ, what God was gonna do through Christ for everyone, now including the Gentiles. And yet, sometimes, again, just I think it's just our human nature, we're gonna struggle. We're gonna struggle with it being, it can't be that easy. It can't be that simple. I mean, here these Judaizers are to go and look, just get circumcised. Just get circumcised and we'll stop. You'll be fine. If you just get circumcised, you'll be fine. And we're gonna look in the next few episodes where Paul gets absolutely apoplectic. It's a great word. He loses his uh patience over this. That even if you want to follow one law, you're gonna be guilty of all of them. Like, why would you trust in one thing? And here they are just pushing this and pushing this and pushing this. And Paul's like, No, that's not happening. And he and this is gonna end, I not say end, but this is ending sort of his chapter three and chapter four continual teaching of you're being misled, you're being led astray. And it's not about the law, it's not about human effort, it's not about accomplishing these things, even even trying to control the things in your life. And and it again, it's not about behavior. We want it to be about behavior sometimes. Not the behavior that we struggle with, the behavior that we we've got locked down, but it's not about behavior, it's about trust. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for your word. Thank you again for helping us not only read your word, but to understand it and to begin to grasp it. May we, as we've observed today, may we apply well uh just any area of our life that we are trying to control, navigate, manipulate, press through, accomplish all the things in our own effort, in human effort, which is an echo of the law, an echo of even that story of Ishmael. Versus understanding that everything that we receive, everything that we've been given, everything that our grace has afforded us, everything that we're walking through, we walk through in the humility of people who don't deserve it, but we've received it, who cannot earn it, but have been trusted with it as heirs with Christ. God, it's a beautiful thing, but it is, it does take work. It takes work for us to deny ourselves, to crucify ourselves and our flesh and walk in the newness of your spirit. Pray God that you will continue to let us as we move through Galatians and we'll continue to learn from your word how this continues to look in our lives. And we pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen. Again, guys, don't forget to comment below, engage. If you enjoy this podcast and you enjoy what we're doing, even on YouTube, please like this. Please rate it, review it, engage with us. This is one of the best ways for us to be shared with people who don't know anything about us, but who would also like to walk through scripture together. Again, guys, we've been set free in Christ. Let's continue to stay free.