Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And yesterday I had this great idea to set up a really significant tension that was going to carry us through into today. We talked about American president Herbert Hoover from about a hundred years ago. And I was like, well, Herbert Hoover was certainly beloved in his hometown of West Branch, Iowa, where his presidential library stands to this day. He has quite the positive reputation there. He was very well received in West Branch, Iowa. But when you go out to the larger United States of America, he's not as well received or as well regarded. His legacy is more complex. Likewise, we've spent a few weeks discovering that the Galatians seem to have received Galatians with open arms and internalized it. And it looks like the churches there thrived. But the tension I was trying to set up was, what about the rest of Christianity? Was the legacy of Galatians more complex outside of Galatia? What did the rest of early Christians think in the early church? And I started to make fun of myself a little bit for this, I think, by the end of yesterday's episode, but that's a laughable tension, Whitman. What are you doing? Galatians is in the Bible. Clearly, Christians like Galatians, like a lot. I mean, there are a bunch of books that have been very, very good that Christians have written that date back even to Judaism before the New Testament. I mean, really good with really good things in them, but they're not in the Bible. Galatians is, you know, in the Bible. So I would say that my question is d dumb and not nearly as tension-building or provocative as uh as one would hope. Christians received Galatians, it was well received. The question of today is not, did they like Galatians in the early church or did they not? The question is, how do we know beyond the fact that it's in the Bible? What does it sound like when big names in early Christianity talk about Galatians? So the legacy of Galatians outside of Galatia. Well, one, within the Bible, the ideas of Galatians won out, as we've discussed many times at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. What are the big tenets of Galatians? Well, we'll run it down more specifically tomorrow, but Christians don't have to become Jews to be Christians. So Gentiles, that is, don't have to become Jews to become Christians. The purpose of the law, it was never meant to save, it isn't an avenue to salvation because of human weakness. What it does do is reveal the character of God, the plan of God, and it served as a tutor, a difficult teacher before the time of Christ. Galatians teaches that there is a new family of faith. It deals with the tension between God's ethnic family of faith, the chosen people, the Jewish people, and this new larger family of faith that He has now created. Most notably and most importantly, what I want us to take from this, the central theme of Galatians, the clown hammer, we just can't say it enough theme that just keeps getting pounded and coming up again and again and again, is that right standing with God is through faith alone, in Christ alone, by grace alone. That's it. Right standing with God is not earned, it cannot be earned. There is no works-based avenue toward right standing with God. It is the gift of God so that no one can boast. And yes, I dipped into another one of Paul's letters there just a little bit for that particular language. Maybe the last two big important themes of Galatians is that the life we live in Christ, we live by the Spirit. So we don't go to the temple to encounter God, but rather God indwells believers and we walk in that. And then finally, Galatians is a book that really strengthens the apostolic claim to the authority of the original apostles, the people who Jesus commissioned. Galatians throws it right down. There's an actual faith that was handed down to us, and this is it. Life by the Spirit, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, salvation. That is the true faith. Any competing message is not the true version. I suppose at the most basic level, the big point is there's a true version of Christian faith. There's only one, and there's a whole bunch of false versions of Christian faith. Don't do the false ones, but do do the true one. So we know the early church really agreed with that and liked it because the Jerusalem Council, in a much more succinct way, basically affirms the same thing, and then they send out people like Paul Barnabas, Silas, and others to go with this message and make sure everybody at these upstart churches knows that that is indeed the deal. Well, as the New Testament is being written, the concept of the New Testament is already taking shape because the New Testament refers to other parts of the New Testament as scripture. I've mentioned it to you before. I'm stalling and turning to it right now, but at the end of 2 Peter, again, this is the guy who Paul had a fight with that's recorded in Galatians 2. But here Peter is affirming that what Paul is writing is scripture. This is 2 Peter 3 14. So then, dear friends, since you're looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless, and at peace with him. Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do the other scriptures to their own destruction. Peter is saying that Paul is writing Bible scripture, the authority on the same level as the Old Testament. He is also saying people are trying to twist it and they're trying to mess with it. He's also saying some of it is complex, but there's also an optimism to Peter's remarks about the intelligibility of it. You can understand what is going on there. So the New Testament affirms other parts of the New Testament as scripture, as Bible. And I specifically for reasons that I probably won't get into right now, but I think I covered earlier on. I think that right here, Peter is primarily talking about Galatians and the argumentation that Paul is making about the stuff that Peter earlier got wrong. I think he's speaking from experience here. Like I, you know, it was a little complicated for me, as a matter of fact. Additionally, the whole New Testament is in unison. It affirms everything that Paul is saying in Galatians. It's not like Galatians is pitted against other parts. The one book that people at times have tried to pit against Galatians is James, yet James in Acts 15 affirms what Paul is saying around the subject matter of Galatians. And a closer reading of James makes it clear that the book of James, which really emphasizes the fruit that is born out of obedience to God and right standing with God, is the unavoidable evidence, the unavoidable consequence of walking by the Spirit of being in right standing with God. It is not the thing that earns you that. At no point is James making the case that there is such a thing as works-based salvation or right standing with God. So even the book of the New Testament, that some have tried to say, Oh, you know, this is an intention with Galatians. Look closer. It ain't. A guy named Polycarp, he was probably a student of John himself. So, like, we're talking generation two of Christian discipleship. Jesus taught John, John taught Polycarp. This guy wrote to the Philippian church after Paul was dead and gone, and he used a whole bunch of language in doing so from the book of Galatians. When Polycarp really gets into the heart of his critique and his argumentation about how the leadership ought to be doing things there in Philippi, he uses the same language that Paul uses at the end of Galatians about don't be deceived. God cannot be mocked. And then here's another one, probably about a hundred years after the writing of Galatians, a guy named Justin Martyr, not his given last name, he got that one after he died, I think, has a work called Dialogue with Trifo. Trifo was a devout Jew who did not like the Jesus thing, would not have liked the book of Galatians. And Justin and Trifo go back and forth about what do you do with the Old Testament? What do you do with Jesus? And Justin specifically uses Paul's argumentation from Galatians about all of that stuff about cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. He uses language about the law, was our tutor, our instructor until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under the law. Justin also uses Paul's language about the fullness of time. When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law. So when things get really gritty and the pressure is ratcheted up between Justin and his competent, intelligent Jewish critic Trifo, Justin goes to Galatians as a foundation for his argument. Irenaeus of Lyon, Lyon is spelled like Lyons, L-Y-O-N-S. It's in France, but you pronounce it Lyon, because I don't know, French. He wrote against a lot of heretics and a lot of heresies, and he often explicitly cited Paul and the book of Galatians, and he did so by name. Quote, as also the blessed Paul says in the epistle to the Galatians, quote, quote, O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you that you should not obey? And he goes on, he gives the whole quote that you're very familiar with. And Irenaeus says, in this, he, Paul, most clearly shows that they who put their trust in the flesh and in circumcision are destitute of the spirit and of Christ. Dang! Here's a guy a century later who clearly understands the heart of what Paul is saying in Galatians. He is treating it as obvious, inarguable Christian orthodoxy. He put it in a book called Against Heresies, meaning that for sure within a hundred years of Galatians being written, to not agree with Galatian theology was rightly regarded, as far away as France, as being an obvious and overt heresy. And did you catch he's using that flesh and spirit language, even there? I mean, this is a dude who absolutely, I mean, clearly has deeply studied Galatians and internalized it and knows what it means and is using it as a measure of faith against people who are advocating for any of those false versions of the gospel that aren't the real one. And here's Irenaeus pointing them back to the actual one. I've got quotes from Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian as well. Trust me, they're really good. Tertullian gives a nod to uh it's for freedom that Christ has set us free. Clement gives us another nod to that imagery of the the law being a teacher, a tough schoolmaster. Clement also, this is important. Clement of Alexandria also talks about Paul's teaching in Galatians about the relationship between the Jewish family of faith in the Old Testament and the new family of faith. He writes as Paul also teaches, saying, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you're all one in Christ Jesus. For in truth, the same nature and the same virtue belong to every one of us who lives according to the gospel. Everybody I just cited is writing from within fifty-ish years after Galatians was written, up to about a hundred and fifty years after Galatians was written. I gave you people from Western Europe. I gave you people from North Africa, I cited church leaders from in and around Jerusalem. And the only other one I want to mention is a heretic, a Gnostic, a dualist, who, of all things, is actually from pretty close to North Galatia, maybe just right on the borderlands of extreme North Galatia. There's a guy from the second century named Marcion of Sinope or Sinope. I never know how to say it. And when I read it quietly to myself, I just do it however I want in my brain. But now I have a microphone on and I said it out loud and I kind of got all nervous. And this Marcion fellow, he's not a Christian. He's a Gnostic. He makes his way to Rome. He's super rich. He basically writes a fat check to the Roman church, the church that received Romans, like the companion book to Galatians. And they sort of stupidly put him a little bit in charge, and then they realize what he thinks, and they're like, ah, here's your money back. Stop teaching this insane stuff. But one of the things that Marcion did is he drew a line. He had a measure. And he said, These are the books that are true, New Testament, these are the books that are not. And his list was way shorter than the actual New Testament list. Marcion liked spiritual things. He didn't like physical things. The Bible teaches that God is the God of creation and physical things, and that the physical and incarnational things is part of the work of God. Marcion rejected all of that stuff. Specifically, Marcion said there are ten letters from the early church that should be treated as scripture, and his absolute favorite was Galatians. It came first in his canon. Luke was the first book and Galatians was the second book. Now Marcion carved it up and basically just cut out the parts where he's like, well, Paul was right on almost all of it. He was wrong on these things right in here. And the early church, which had apparently so many copies of the actual version of Galatians, was like, you can't just de-Galatianify it. You can't just rewrite it. You're out of here. Get lost. This is ridiculous. And Marcion's sect, you know, it re-emerged in different forms over the centuries, but basically it died out. There's not a strong continuity from him. And Galatians obviously persevered. In part, Marcion, the declared heretic from basically Galatia, the place where Galatians was written to, was one of the really key figures in prompting the early church to say, Hey, like we know what Bible is, but I guess we have to formalize it because other people might come along and mess with it or change the words or change the book list. And pretty quickly what had been regarded as Bible for quite a while really becomes solidified, and we have a whole bunch of evidence from the early church that church leaders like the ones I mentioned had a very clear sense and clear boundary markers of what was and was not Bible. And I just think it's interesting in terms of the legacy of Galatians that a dude from the far north of basically Galatia latched on to Galatians as his favorite book and mutated it into something else, and that really forced the early church to formalize things that had been clear to them for some time prior. Okay, we covered a lot of ground today, but the gist is this. I apologized for setting up an incredibly weak tension yesterday that is really no tension at all. Surprise! Christians super like Galatians, Christians from all around the global ancient church. They all really like Galatians. Heretics from all different parts of the ancient church attacked the teachings found in Galatians, and Christians all around the Christian world cited Galatians and other stuff in the New Testament that echoes that to push back and defend the one true gospel handed down to them. Galatians was a tremendous gift, not just to you and me now, not just to the historic Christian church, but it was a tremendous gift to the fledgling, maybe even vulnerable early church, and the early church leaders leaned on it repeatedly to make sure that the Christian church was focused on the Christian gospel. Right standing with God is through Christ alone, by faith alone, through grace alone. That's it. There is no other way. There is no works-based salvation. There is no Jesus plus some other pagan tradition. There is no version of right standing with God that is achieved by doing a really good job with the Old Testament law and some Jesus mixed in there. It's Jesus plus nothing. Like Abraham, who believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, that's actually always been the way it is. And clearly, just even from the little bit we've looked at today, Galatians was a hammer, or in our parlance, a clown hammer to bludgeon and wreck these false competing versions of the gospel, these human-centric versions of the gospel that kept cropping up. Sweet, there you go. Unlike Herbert Hoover, who has a great reputation in West Branch, Iowa, but not such a great reputation in the rest of the United States, Galatians has a great reputation in Galatia and a great reputation everywhere else within Christianity as well. Go, Galatians, that was fun. One more tomorrow, and then we're done. Hi five. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.