Galatians 3:26
Galatians 3:2626You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.
JWs read — "you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus" — through the lens of the Watchtower's two-class system. The "sons of God" language is restricted to the 144,000 anointed remnant; the great crowd of "other sheep" relate to God as "friends" rather than as sons. with its "Spirit of adoption" and "heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ" is read the same way: heirship and sonship belong only to the heavenly class. therefore tends to receive little exposition in JW literature, because its plain reading cuts directly across this two-tier soteriology.
is one of Paul's strongest universal-scope statements. "You are all (pantes) sons of God through faith… there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise." The pantes is the same word Paul uses at ("all men to be saved… one mediator between God and men… ransom for all") and ("everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved"). Paul demolishes every distinction that might create a two-tier salvation: ethnicity, status, gender. He cannot then leave intact a hidden third distinction between an "anointed" inner class and a "great crowd" outer class — because the entire argument of Galatians 3 is that all believers receive the Spirit, all become sons, all become heirs, by faith in Christ apart from any class distinction. The verse pairs naturally with ("if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ") to expose the impossible position the Watchtower's mediator-restriction puts the great crowd in: if they are not sons of God by faith in Christ, they are outside Christ entirely. Read with / ("from the least to the greatest"), the new covenant promise itself refuses any restriction to a 144,000 elite.