Spirit and Flesh in Galatians

One line from Galatians is often aimed at people who begin to take God’s commandments seriously: “You began in the Spirit. Why would you want to finish in the flesh?”

The claim behind it is simple. Life in Messiah is life in the Spirit, and life in the Spirit is life by love. To go back to the law instead of love is to slide from the Spirit into the flesh, and Paul said so himself in Galatians 3:3.

That sounds right to a great many sincere believers, and the reason is not hard to find. When most of us hear the word “flesh,” we hear the opposite of “spirit.” Spirit is inner, living, and free, while flesh is outward and physical, a matter of rules and rituals. Place the commandments in the second box, and the verse seems to say exactly what the claim says.

Paul, however, did not write with our boxes. He wrote with his own words, and he defined them. Before deciding what “flesh” means in Galatians 3:3, we will let three witnesses tell us: the verse before it, the end of the same letter, and Paul’s letter to Rome.

The Question Before the Question

Galatians 3:1-3 O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, not to obey the aletheia ἀλήθεια al-ay'-thi-a(truth)? — before whose eyes Yeshua Messiah was publicly portrayed among you as crucified! This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit) by the works of nomos νόμος nom'-os(law), or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the pneuma(spirit), are you now being perfected by sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh)?

The claim quotes the third of these verses, but Paul says that the second is “the only thing I want to find out from you”: did they receive the pneuma(spirit) “by the works of nomos(law), or by hearing with faith?”

That is a question about how the Spirit was received. It is, in other words, the first of the two questions this book has carried since Chapter 1: how does a sinner come to God? The Galatians knew the answer. They had heard the good news of a crucified Messiah, believed it, and received the Spirit. No one had circumcised them first, and nothing they had done had earned it.

When verse 3 asks, “Having begun by the pneuma(spirit), are you now being perfected by sarx(flesh)?” the contrast is still the contrast of verse 2. They began by receiving the Spirit through faith, and now they were trying to be made complete by something else. The word for “perfected” is epiteleo ἐπιτελέω ep-ee-tel-eh'-o, to bring to completion or to finish. The question is what the Galatians were being told would finish them and make them complete, and we already know what the visitors were preaching.

Flesh at the End of the Letter

Paul shows plainly what he means by flesh when he returns to the same people at the close of the letter. In Chapter 32 we read the first of these verses to learn who the visitors were. This time we read both of them for a single word:

Galatians 6:12-13 Those who desire to make a good showing in sarx(flesh) try to compel you to be circumcised, simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Messiah. For those who are circumcised do not even keep the nomos(law) themselves, but they desire to have you circumcised so that they may boast in your sarx(flesh).

Sarx appears twice, once in “a good showing in sarx(flesh)” and again in “boast in your sarx(flesh).” The flesh here is quite literal; it is the body on which circumcision is performed. The attitude surrounding it is the wish to look good and to have something to boast about. “A good showing” is a single word in Greek, euprosopeo εὐπροσωπέω yoo-pros-o-peh'-o, to put on a fair face, to look good from the outside.

Set that beside Galatians 3:3. The Galatians had begun by the Spirit, received through faith. To be “perfected by sarx(flesh)” was to be told that they were not complete until they bore a mark in the body that someone else could boast about. That is what “flesh” means in this letter: not the keeping of God’s commandments, but the wish to be made complete and admired through circumcision. Verse 13 repeats what we saw in Chapter 5, that the people pressing it “do not even keep the nomos(law) themselves.”

Picture a young fruit tree in a garden. It was planted, watered, and warmed by the sun, and it is alive and growing. Then a neighbor leans over the fence and says, “It will never look finished like that. Let me wire some wax apples onto the branches, so that people walking by will be impressed.” The tree began in life, and the neighbor wants to finish it with a good showing. No one would say that the tree’s problem was that it was growing real fruit. The problem is the wax.

Flesh in Romans

Paul uses the same word in the same way in his letter to Rome, and there he gives it a definition. We read these verses in Chapters 7 and 8, where we saw that the law stands on the spirit’s side of the line. Here we read them for what they say the flesh is:

Romans 8:4; 8:7 so that the dikaioma δικαίωμα dik-ah'-yo-mah(ordinance) of the nomos(law) might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the sarx(flesh) but according to the pneuma(spirit). … Because the phronema φρόνημα fron'-ay-mah(mindset) of the sarx(flesh) is hostility toward God, for it does not submit to the nomos(law) of God — indeed it cannot —

In Paul’s own definition, then, the flesh is the side that will not submit to God’s law, and indeed cannot. Romans 7:14 had already said on which side the law itself stands: “the nomos(law) is spiritual, but I am sarx(flesh)ly.”

The same chapter speaks of the Spirit. Verse 4 says that the dikaioma, the ordinance, of the nomos is “fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the sarx(flesh) but according to the pneuma(spirit).” The word dikaioma (δικαίωμα) means a righteous requirement, an ordinance carried out. Those who walk by the Spirit are the ones in whom the law’s requirement is fulfilled.

In the Bible’s own terms, therefore, the lines run the opposite way from the claim. The flesh is the side that abandons God’s law, and the Spirit is the side that walks in it.

Law or Love?

The claim also sets the law against love, as though a person had to choose between them. We saw in Chapter 29 that Paul answered this in the same letter: “the whole nomos(law) is fulfilled in one logos λόγος log'-os(word), in the statement, ‘You shall agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay(love) your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14). Love is not the road away from the law; it is the way the law is fulfilled. And the deeds Paul calls “the deeds of sarx(flesh)” in Galatians 5, as we saw in Chapter 31, are the very things the Torah forbids.

Begun and Finished in the Spirit

To begin by the Spirit and be perfected by the flesh, then, is to begin by faith, receiving the Spirit as a gift, and afterward to be told that one is not finished until a mark is cut in the body that others can boast about. It is the visitors’ gospel, the one this whole letter fights.

It does not mean that a believer who loves God and walks in His commandments has slipped into the flesh. By Paul’s own definitions it is the other way around. The flesh is what refuses God’s law, and those who walk by the Spirit are the ones in whom its requirement is fulfilled. To begin in the Spirit and to go on in the Spirit is to walk in what God commanded, out of love and by His power.

A larger question hangs over all of Part Three. If the Torah is holy and spiritual, why did God promise a new covenant at all? The usual answer comes from the letter to the Hebrews: “if that first diatheke διαθήκη dee-ath-ay'-kay(covenant) had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second” (Hebrews 8:7). The first covenant, it is said, had a fault. Yet the very next sentence names those with whom God was finding fault.