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Paul was so overcome with hatred of his Judaizing rivals [those who taught obedience to the commandments along with faith] that he had difficulty keeping his thinking and arguments straight. With a little background of the Old Testament, Christians could easily see that at times Paul is a classic schizophrenic. Such is obvious to the dedicated student of Scripture, but such is not apparent to the casual reader. Only by laying passage against passage are such glaring errors easily noticeable and this takes a lot of time to accomplish. Over the last 15 years I have devoted myself to such scrupulous study and have discovered of what I now write. Paul’s goal was to "put down" Judaizers (those teaching obedience to Torah (that part of it that referred to them as non-Jews in the Covenant of Noah) for Gentile acceptance with God as the fruit of their faith and not faith or mental ascent and affirmation of Paul's unique interpretation of his "Jesus"), whether Jews, Christians, or Gentiles. In opposition to Judaizers, Paul’s analogies were derogatory to Jews. As usual he called on the Hebrew Bible to help him in his cause but has to misquote and lift out of context verses in order to give a false "Prophetic" authority for his doctrines when teaching those who lacked fundamental understanding of the Jewish Scriptures in the first place.
In one of the most jumbled passages in the New Testament (Gal 4:21-31) Paul discussed Sarah and Hagar, Abraham's wife and Egyptian concubine, respectively. The women and their children became allegorical representations. However, Paul inverted their roles so that Hagar, the slave woman, and her son [remember not the son of the promise but the son of the flesh and disobedience of Abraham] symbolized the Jews of Jerusalem supposedly enslaved by the Law and the Mosaic Covenant. Paul would have us believe that Ishmael [the son of the flesh because of Abraham’s lack of faith in the Word of God when he took it upon himself to have a son with other than Sarah] was the symbol of the Jews given the Torah at Sinai and not Isaac, the son of the promise of Abraham (THINK)! Ishmael is not of faith but of flesh and Paul compares the results of "flesh" to Isaac (the son of faith) and gets it completely backward!
Answer for yourself: How are we to believe this analogy…is white black and black white?
Paul goes on to characterize Sarah and her offspring as becoming the free Gentiles "in the Jerusalem that is above."
Answer for yourself: Are we to believe that the Sarah, the mother of the son of Abraham who is the promised child to whom God renews the Abrahamic Covenant with later, is to representative of the Gentiles no less to whom the Abrahamic Covenant was never renewed?
Yet, Isaac and his descendants were later depicted as the "Children of promise," a term who for Paul for some reason meant not the Jewish people who accepted the Unconditional Abrahamic Covenant with God, but meant rather the uncircumcised Gentiles who refused the Law but accepted Yeshua instead.
The verse that Paul chose to support his creative scenario was Isaiah 54:1, the contents of which again bear no relation to Sarah and Hagar. Again Paul misquotes verses in order to justify his pre-formed theological aberrations. It reads as follows:
Answer for yourself: Are you aware that Paul connects the “barrenness” of Sarah to the Jews who obey the commandments and the Law as their response to their faith in God, yet the verse has nothing to do with obedience to commandments? He takes the passage completely out of context and the parallel is not sound!
Answer for yourself: What is the historical meaning of the Isaiah passage?
This verse is the beginning of another encouraging chapter in Isaiah dealing with the joy and glorious future of Israel upon return to Zion from captivity and has absolutely nothing to do with the commandments of God.
Isaiah had addressed Jerusalem in allegorical terms. Before exile, when Israel was united with God (actually married to God), Jerusalem was very populous. During the exile and deportation of the Jews the city was desolate like a childless woman. Now, upon the return of the Judeans to the homeland following the captivity because they disobeyed God’s Laws, the city would know again honor and prosperity and would have an even greater population.
Answer for yourself: Don't you think it rather impossible to believe Paul, that obedience to the Law and the commandments instead of faith alone was “barrenness” when Isaiah expresses the exact opposite: great Joy at the return of the exiles to Israel where they can again begin to obey God and His Laws since re-established in their land...their disobedience of the same Laws that cause their exile in the first place (THINK)?
Nowhere in Isaiah is any reference to be construed that obedience to God’s commandments by the Jews led to spiritual barrenness as Paul would have us believe.
Nor is there any idea connected to the original passage in Isaiah that a “second” covenant was better than the “first” covenant, or that a second covenant had replaced the covenant re-affirmed with Isaac and which would likewise be re-affirmed with Jacob.