Read It Again
By Professor E M Blaiklock MA DLitt.
XLVIII.
THE SCHOOLMASTER.
Please re-read Galatians 3.
Does Paul incorporate the Law by saying, "The law is our school-master to lead us to Christ?" Not exactly. The verse is a trifle misleading in the Authorised Version. What the text really says is:
• The law is our pedagogue to lead us to Christ.
The Greek word
"paedagogos" is by derivation
"one who takes a child." He was a trusted slave, of sound, tried character, who took the child to school, superintended his play and his companions, and brought him safely home. His was a protec-tive, not an educative office. He made sure that his charge was brought to the one who should teach him. So in Paul's figure, the Law. Perhaps he had in mind his own experience detailed in the Epistle to the Romans. Revealing to him his helplessness, the Law led him to the true Teacher.
Perhaps, too, he was thinking nationally. The Law was designed to suggest its own incompleteness. A Messiah was to come, and in the centuries of waiting the moral ordinances and the ritual kept alive the sense of duty, of dependence, and of sin, which, like the Greek paedagogue, safely led, or should have led, the infant people to the feet of True Instruction, when at last He came Who was to give it. The Law, then, was no true teacher who could "lead into all truth," but an interim revelation, a tried and trusted servant, but no more, from whose care the soul or nation should pass in due time and place.