The persons spoken of as having been under the law, previously to the coming of faith, are not represented as aliens from the family of God. The meaning of this language is not obscure. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. This is the privilege of all believers. The general idea obviously is, that under the Christian dispensation our religious privileges depend on nothing but our connection with Christ Jesus, which is formed entirely by faith.
External distinctions are here of no avail.
And all who are in Christ Jesus are blessed with the same privileges. Believers when they have put on Christ, put off these external distinctions, and appear, as it were, all one in Christ Jesus. Figurative illustration of these two states There is an unhappy disposition in mankind to overlook and underrate the advantages which they enjoy, while at the same time they often attach an utterly disproportioned value to supposed advantages of which they are destitute. It is in consequence of this, too, that in circumstances furnishing everything requisite to substantial comfort we find so many completely miserable, just because they are without something or other which, whether right or wrong, they have imagined to be necessary in order to make them happy. The Galatian Christians, chiefly of gentile origins, were in great hazard of being led dangerously astray by that principle in human nature, to the operations of which I have been adverting, at the period the apostle Paul wrote this epistle to them.