Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadHeinrich Meyer Commentary - Galatians 4:8 - 4:8
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Gal_4:8. Ἀλλά ] Nevertheless, how fearfully at variance is your present retrograde attitude with the fact of this divine deliverance from your previous lost condition! This topic is dealt with down to Gal_4:11. Observe that ἀλλά introduces the two corresponding relations τότε μέν and νῦν δέ in conjunction.[187]
τότε ] then; reminds the readers of the past time, in which they were still δοῦλοι (Gal_4:7).
οὐκ εἰδότες Θεόν ] Cause of the ἐδουλεύσατε which follows. In the non-knowledge of God (for οὐκ εἰδότ . forms one idea) lies the fundamental essence of the heathenism, to which the apostle’s readers had mostly belonged. Comp. 1Th_4:5; Act_17:23; Act_17:30, et al. As to the relation of the thought to Rom_1:20 f., see on that passage.
ἐδουλεύσατε ] The aorist simply designates the state of bondage then existing as now at an end, without looking at its duration or development. See Kühner, II. p. 73 f.
τοῖς φύσει μὴ οὖσι θεοῖς ] to the gods, who by nature however are not so! For, in the apostle’s view, the realities which were worshipped by the heathen as gods, were not gods, but demons. See on 1Co_10:20. In his view, therefore, their nature was not divine, but at the same time not of mere mundane matter (Ewald) (comp. Wis_13:1 ff.); it was demoniac,—a point which must have been well known to the Galatians from his oral instruction.
The negation denies subjectively, from the apostle’s view. Comp. 2Ch_13:9 : ἐγένετο εἰς ἱερέα τῷ μὴ ὄντι Θεῷ .
[187] But so, that the thought introduced by δέ (ver. 9) is the main thought. Comp. Baeumlein, Partikell. p. 168.