Galatians 3:2-3 Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? 3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
Here is the key question for the Galatians. They had experienced the Holy Spirit in the past. Paul does not say here how they experienced the Spirit but they knew. The book of Acts gives many stories of how people experienced the filling of the Holy Spirit. Often there were various signs and wonders. Minimally, the Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God (Romans 8:16). Whatever the case in Galatia, Paul uses that experience as a reference point for his argument in this chapter. His reminder of faith in Christ in 2:21 is the theological base. The reminder here of the Spirit is the experiential base.
The Galatians did not receive the Spirit by works of the law. This is a key phrase from 2:16 that refers to attempting to be righteous by obedience to the law. It is “works” because it requires human effort. These “works” were what the Jewish infiltrators in Galatia were teaching the churches. This was a misunderstanding of the law, its purpose, and how it fits into God’s plan of salvation. Paul will correct this false teaching in the next three chapters.
A person receives the Holy Spirit by hearing with faith. The Holy Spirit is a gift from God. This gift is the fulfillment of Old Testament promises, that God would dwell with his people. God comes to us when we accept his invitation. This is a matter of trust and not effort. It requires letting go of our struggle to be good and allowing the Holy Spirit to make us good. This is a difficult idea for many people and challenging to live out in every day life. Paul will help the Galatians see that in this chapter.
And then Paul calls them foolish for a second time in this chapter. They should have known this because of the message he had already preached to them. But he had been away for some unknown time. There may have been new believers. Somehow and sometime they had wandered from this essential truth. The reason Paul calls them this is because they had reversed the order of salvation: they can gone from an experience of the Spirit back to the flesh, instead of moving away from the flesh to the Spirit. The Spirit gives us victory over the flesh and connects us to a new existence in Christ that begins in this life and lasts for all eternity. The Galatians had experienced the Spirit but then turned to the law and its regulations in order to be righteous.
The key and sometimes difficult idea to understand is that faith in the Holy Spirit should be seen in obedience, but this obedience is one governed by the freedom to love, not the bondage to a set of regulations such as circumcision. Obedience, therefore, is the response of faith and is in response to the leading of the Holy Spirit.
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