SUMMARY
Those who have been crucified with Christ now live by faith in the Son of God. They are justified by grace through faith in Christ, not by doing works of the law.
ANALYSIS
Moving from “we” to a more personal “I,” these verses come as the climax to Paul’s narrative of his commissioning as a servant of the gospel. In 13 references to “gospel” up to this point, PaulThe Apostle Paul, originally known as Saul of Tarsus, was the author of several New Testament letters and the founder of many Christian communities. has heralded the gospel as the good news of the power of God’s call to him and to all Christians through the graceGrace is the unmerited gift of God's love and acceptance. In Martin Luther's favorite expression from the Apostle Paul, we are saved by grace through faith, which means that God showers grace upon us even though we do not deserve it. shown in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has given himself to set people free from death and the present evil age (1:4, 15).
Now for the first time, Paul turns to talk of the good news in the new language of “justification” or “being made right with God.” This witness is simply Paul’s bold statement of faith (“we have come to believe”) that is clearly grounded in his personal experience of God’s call elaborated at some length in the preceding verses (1:11-2:14). In 2:16, he three times emphatically states the content of this belief, both positively and negatively and in reverse arrangement, the repetition marking these words as the significant capsule summary of the gospel that informs and shapes the whole of Galatians: “A person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.”In 2:19-21, Paul then turns to describe the basis and the effects of this justifying grace of God. In what is certainly a reference to baptismJesus was baptized (literally, "dipped") in the Jordan River by John the Baptizer, at which time he was acclaimed from heaven as God's Son, the Beloved. Much later baptism became one of the sacraments of the Church, the action by which a person is incorporated... (see Galatians 3:27 and the more specific development of this idea in Romans 6:1-11), justification comes through being joined to the crucifixion of Christ. Being joined to the death and resurrection of Christ means to experience in the flesh that “new creationCreation, in biblical terms, is the universe as we know or perceive it. Genesis says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the book of Revelation (which speaks of end times) the author declares that God created all things and...” (Galatians 6:15) in which Paul and every Christian already live–not in the self, but by faith in the Son of God, “who loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20).
