"Days you [all] are watching, and months and seasons and years."
-Legalism. Religion. Systems of works designed to advance one’s standing in relation to some deity or spirit or some other spiritual goal thru self-effort and careful watching. This is the default position of fallen man, and that’s the mindset which was slowly (re)infecting the Galatian church - faulty ineffectual works driven by a guilty conscience, persistent nagging feelings of guilt because we all are in fact guilty (or were, apart from Christ). But no amount of self-effort can remove it. It is Lady Macbeth - "Out, damned spot, out, I say!" And she continueth - "What, will these hands never be clean?... Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!" To which the doctor rightly observeth, "More needs she the divine than the physician. God, God forgive us all...!"
-In traditional Judaism they observed and paid careful attention to sabbaths, new moons, days and weeks and months of fasting and feasting, festivals of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles, years of sabbaticals and of redemption and jubilee - the Jewish calendar was crammed-full of year-round, round-the-clock rituals, each and every one a work, part of the exhaustive (exhausting) system of sacrifice and guilt-removal. Endeavoring endlessly to appease the wrath of the God of Israel issuing forth against their innumerable transgressions. Now there is nothing wrong with a feast or a festival per se, but these Galatians, having begun well by placing their faith in Christ for forgiveness, were now buying in to the notion that careful observance was still required of them, that strict obedience was necessary in order to maintain their forgiveness and right standing with God, a reality which in fact became and always remained theirs as a free gift of God’s grace simply through faith in Christ...! God's forgiveness is never earned, no matter how big the transgression, no matter how huge the self-effort.
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