Galatians 4:21-31 Our passage today shows us that in early Christianity, there was not some golden age without any controversy or trouble. The issue here was the Gentiles. Who were they? Were they unclean threats who needed to become culturally Jewish so that they could then be acceptable to God, or were they created in God’s image and able to stand on level ground with the Jews through faith in Jesus Christ? This passage also shows us that Paul was engaged in the cultural and theological disputes of his day. He was fully aware of how the false teachers in Galatia were using the Bible to defend their position – the idea that a Gentile must embrace the Mosaic covenant to become a Christian – and he stepped in to correct their error. Right now, for us, abortion is a major cultural and theological dispute. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the state is now essentially asking us, as voting citizens, what we think about abortion. At some point, my boys will get old enough to learn about this, and they will ask me. What will I say? How will what I say impact their understanding of who God is, what a human being is, and how to live with wisdom and godliness in this world? Paul took a moment in his letter to the Galatians to speak to a very specific cultural issue of his day. So we are going to look at this passage and do the same thing with a cultural issue in our day. First, what is this metaphor? Second, why this metaphor? Third, distorting Scripture