8 Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. 9 But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? 10 You observe days and months and seasons and years! 11 I am afraid I may have laboured over you in vain.
The servility of the old life is well underlined in 8. 'Not to know' the true and living God means to 'act as a slave' to false gods, and Paul expresses astonishment that any who had become Christians and therefore members of the new order could possibly revert to the old. Let us also be quite clear about this. To adopt legalistic attitudes is not to advance in spiritual life, it is to take a retrograde step that always proves disastrous. The man who is committed to slavish observance of rules and regulations has not - as, alas, he is prone to imagine - reached a deeper stage of experience; on the contrary, he is in bondage of his own making, and needs to be set free to live in the liberty of Christ. This is a word that has more relevance than we might care to think for the many prohibitions and taboos that exist in evangelical life today, and that are responsible for the 'negativism' in so many lives. It is true, of course, that there are decisive negatives in the Christian life - the 'thou shalt nots' of the Ten Commandments are of permanent validity for all true believers - but when the most marked characteristics of a man's life are the prohibitions and taboos that control and direct it, then something has gone seriously wrong with his experience and calls for a frank and honest - and courageous - reassessment of the situation. He is not free, but in bondage.