📖 Passage Breakdown — Galatians 3:2

 

“This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?”

 

📜 Background, Setting & Purpose

 

✍️ Author

 

Paul the Apostle.

 

👥 Written To

Gentile believers in the churches of Galatia who had been justified by faith alone through Paul’s gospel.

 

⏲️ When

 

Approximately A.D. 48–49, shortly after Paul’s first missionary journey and just before the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15).

 

🌍 Setting & Purpose (Why Paul Is Asking This)

 

False teachers from Jerusalem had infiltrated Paul’s Gentile churches, teaching that faith in Christ was not enough—that believers must also keep the Mosaic Law, be circumcised, and submit to Israel’s religious system in order to be truly saved.

 

Paul had already been preaching justification by faith alone apart from the Law for nearly ten years. He had planted the Galatian churches around A.D. 45, and sometime before the Jerusalem Council (A.D. 51), these legalistic teachers came in to “spy out” the liberty believers had in Christ (Gal. 2:4) and to bring them back into bondage.

 

This was not a secondary issue. The risen, glorified Lord Jesus Himself sent Paul to Jerusalem to confront this threat because the truth of the gospel was at stake (Gal. 2:2–5). If Paul had yielded, even briefly, the gospel of grace would have been compromised for every believer who followed.

 

Galatians 3:2 is Paul pressing that confrontation directly onto the Galatian believers themselves.

 

📖 Immediate Context

 

In Galatians 3:1, Paul rebuked them for being spiritually deceived—moving away from Christ crucified alone.

 

Now in verse 2, he does something devastatingly simple:
He appeals to their own conversion.

 

No theology debate.
No appeal to tradition.
No rabbinic argument.

 

Just one question.

 

✨ Phrase-by-Phrase Breakdown

 

“This only I want to learn from you…”

 

Paul strips the issue down to one undeniable reality.

 

The entire debate about law and grace stands or falls on this.

 

“Did you receive the Spirit…”

 

Receiving the Holy Spirit is:

 

• the proof of salvation 
• the seal of justification 
• the evidence of belonging to Christ 

 

If they received the Spirit, they were already saved.

 

“…by the works of the law…”

 

Paul forces the absurdity into the open.

 

They were Gentiles.
They were not under the Law.
They were not circumcised.
They were not temple worshipers.

 

The Law did not give them the Spirit.

 

“…or by the hearing of faith?”

 

They heard Paul preach Christ crucified.
They believed.
God gave them the Spirit.

 

Grace came first.
The Spirit came first.
Law came never.

 

❌ What This Verse Does Not Mean

 

• Not that works help secure salvation 
• Not that law contributes to spiritual life 
• Not that faith and law cooperate 
• Not that grace is incomplete 

 

✅ What This Verse Does Mean

 

• Salvation begins by faith alone 
• The Spirit is given at the moment of belief 
• Law does not produce life 
• Grace does 
• Your own conversion proves it 

 

📘 Doctrinal Summary

 

Galatians 3:2 is Paul’s unanswerable argument for justification by faith alone. The Galatians received the Holy Spirit (salvation)—not by law (works), ritual, or obedience—but by believing the gospel Paul preached. Their own salvation exposes the lie of legalism. Works do not maintain salvation because works never produced it. To move from faith to law is not spiritual growth; it is a denial of how God gives life.