Verse fourteen. The apostle has up to this point bent all his efforts at dissuading the Galatians from coming under bondage to law again. Now he exhorts them to love one another. If they do this he says, they will fulfill the law. But how are we to understand this? In Romans 8:4 Paul speaks of the fact that the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in the Christian by the Holy Spirit. There is therefore a sense in which the word law is used other than in the legalistic sense in which Paul has used it throughout this letter so far. It is that sense in which it is conceived of as divine law consisting of ethical principals and standards that inhere in the being of God, and represent those things that go to make up right conduct on the part of man.
Paul’s statement becomes intelligible and consistent when we recognize the following points; first, that believers through their new relation to the Lord Jesus, are released from the whole law as statutes, and from the obligation to obey its statutes, second, that all which God’s law as an expression of His will requires, is included in love, and third, when the believer acts on the principle of love, he is fulfilling in his actions toward God, his fellowman, and himself, all that the Mosaic law would require of him in his position in life were that law in force. The statutes of the law, the believer will incidently obey so far as love itself requires such a course of action of him, and in no case will he obey them as statutes. Thus, the individual is released from one law consisting of a set of ethical principles to which was attached blessing for obedience and punishment in the case of disobedience, a law that gave him neither the desire nor the power to obey its commands, and is brought under another law, the law of love, which is not a set of written commandments but an ethical and spiritual dynamic, produced in the heart of the yielded believer by the Holy Spirit, who gives him both the desire and the power to live a life in which the dominating principle is love, God’s love, which exercises a stronger and stricter control over the heart and is far more efficient at putting out sin in the life than the legalizers think the thunders of Sinai ever were.
The word fulfilled is from pleroō (πλεροω) which means “to make full,” and when used of a task or a course of action, “to fully perform,” here, “to fully obey.” The verb is in the perfect tense, and the translation could read, “The whole law stands fully obeyed.” The idea is not that the whole law is embraced in or summed up in the act of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self, but that in doing that, one is complying with the whole law and its demands.
Translation. For the whole law in one utterance stands fully obeyed: namely in this, Love your neighbor as you do yourself.
Kenneth S. Wuest, Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament: For the English Reader, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 150–152.
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