Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are looking at the writings of a leader of a Galatian church from about 300-ish years after the time Galatians was written. This gentleman's name was Saint Amphilochius. I don't think they called him Saint when he was alive, but he got that title later. And he was a faithful pastor in the city of Iconium. And last time around, we looked at some of his writings, some of his really kind of fun, clever writings that demonstrate that he's still thinking in terms of Galatians, the letter of Galatians. Today I want to look at a homily, a little sermon, a little chunk out of one that takes us even deeper into his theology of Christ and salvation. I'm just going to give you a little bit of a spoiler alert. It turns out that it sounds a lot like Galatians, too. All right, Jeffrey, play some music and we'll pick up where we left off. Okay, so we got this ancient Galatian bishop who is clearly, his theology is clearly super informed by the whole Bible. He knows what the whole Bible is. He wrote a great poem about it. But also it's clearly super informed by the part of the Bible that was written specifically to his church, the part of the Bible that was written to his church by the guy who founded his church, the Apostle Paul. And I think that's a huge deal, not just for demonstrating the continuity of Paul's theology and the gospel and Galatians in Galatia in the classical world, but I think it's an amazing demonstration of the continuity of Christian faith in the whole world, including for us. But wait, I got more. I want to read from an actual sermon now. I mentioned earlier that we have eight surviving messages, sermons, homilies, from Saint Amphilochius of Iconium. And here's an excerpt from one of them. This is a homily on Matthew 26, 39, which says, Going a little further, Jesus fell with his face to the ground and prayed, My Father, if it's possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but you will. So this is in the middle of the scene in the garden, and the betrayal from Judas is right around the corner. It's the very next things. A gut-wrenching scene from Matthew, and Amphilochius is preaching on this to people who have no doubt suffered or known those who have suffered. But in this particular homily, there's a big chunk of it where he's focusing on what Jesus was actually doing in these last days of his earthly life, where he was betrayed and tried and crucified, and then in his resurrection. Why is Jesus going to the cross? So get this. These are very ancient words from the bishop, the pastor of the church, or one of the churches that was the recipient, the original recipient of the letter of Galatians. Just hold that in your mind as context. Here we go. And a quick note here the way he writes this sermon is sort of from the perspective of Jesus. So he's going to ask a question, but why did you suffer, Master? And now he's going to have Jesus give the theological answer to this based on Galatians and the rest of the Bible. Here we go. But why did you suffer, Master? And now this is like Jesus is talking. On account of the salvation of human beings, Jesus says, and let me relate how. And this I do, in order that not by absolute sway but by sympathy I might set free mankind. For if when humanity sinned God was the one who did what was right, that which was done right was not great, but now therefore I became a man and fulfilled the law in behalf of the one who rendered the law useless, in order that the race of humanity might pride itself in relationship to the one who lived a good life, and now therefore, as a representative of Adam, I received the sentence of death, in order that he might receive, that is the race of Adam, through me the gracious gift of the resurrection. When Adam fell, he introduced death. When I did what was right, I in turn introduced the resurrection. And since death reigned from Adam until Moses and it reigned by possessing the body in captivity as sin's accomplice, therefore I took upon myself the same body, which seemed to be an instrument of sin, in order that I, by rendering sin powerless, might render mankind free of sin. But on the other hand, since people were living an evil life by becoming entangled in sin, so that their life was worse than death, therefore, since I prefer the good death over the evil life, I endured death, in order that those who participate in the good death might enjoy the benefit of the true life and enjoy through baptism, for as many have been baptized, have been baptized into my death, in order that just as I myself was raised from the dead, so also they might walk in newness of life. Sermons sounded a little different back then, didn't they? That's just a very different way of framing it up than what you'll normally hear on a Sunday morning. But did you catch the theology? The ideas, the meanings? It's the same. That's Galatians. That is the message that Paul showed up with when he went to these towns for the first time in the middle of the book of Acts. It is the message that Paul came back with each time he successively visited the Galatian churches, each time he came back through Iconium. That's what he went back and strengthened the church in, to use the language of Acts 16. And that message right there is the message that the Judaizers came and messed with by saying, No, life isn't because of what Christ did and the death that he endured and the price that he paid on the cross. No, the right standing with God is made possible by your strict adherence to the law and these additional rules we have made up, and this is all exemplified by circumcision. The Judaizers showed up in Iconium, they showed up all over the place in Galatia, and they tried to undermine that message that faithful bishop Amphilochius was still trying to drill into the heads of the Galatians who probably still wanted to wander away to lesser, faker gospels. But here in this homily on Matthew 26, 39, Amphilochius has the message of the centrality of Christ and the work of Christ from Galatians and from across the Bible back out, and he's holding it up in plain view of everybody. This is who Jesus is. This is what he did. The life in the body, the physical body, the flesh, cannot get it done. The flesh cannot defeat death. The flesh cannot produce life. The flesh cannot produce right standing before God. It's only by the work of Christ, it's only by faith in Christ that there is life. Okay, I know at this point we're into the second day of what I had hoped would be a one-day conversation about the writings of Amphilochius. But even so, my giddiness is the same as it was as the outset of all of this when I told you we had something really fun that we were gonna do, and it's a great payoff for what we just got done doing in Galatians because look at this. It's stuck. It's smoking gun, obvious evidence that the message of Galatians worked in the churches it was written to. At least it worked in Iconium. Look at that. The leader of the church there, 300 years later, the leader of the church is saying the same stuff that Paul was saying in Galatians. He's repeating the same message that Paul delivered to them in the first place. The one that Paul was astonished they so quickly deserted when they first started to wobble that occasioned the writing of the letter of Galatians. The continuity here is remarkable. And it's remarkable because of what it says about Galatia, but it's also remarkable about what it says about the global church and Christianity in general. Little nuggets like this, little encounters with our Christian past and the Christians from other parts of the world writing under different circumstances and in different languages and in different cultures, it's so encouraging to me because of stuff like this. It makes me feel like the provenance is intact. Like we are doing the same thing. We are a part of the same thing. If you've ever sat around and wondered, like, man, I really I'm really excited about my faith and the Bible and you know the modern Christianity that I have in front of me, but maybe you've quietly wondered, you know, but is this the original version or is it kind of a game of telephone and it morphed into a bunch of different stuff? Well, you just heard with your own ears smoking gun evidence of the continuity of the thing. That sounds a lot like the gospel that gets preached in churches today, right there, that sermon from Amphilochius. And that sermon from Amphilochius sounds a whole lot like what we're getting in the Bible, and in particular, it sounds a whole lot like the book of the Bible that was written to the very church that Amphilochius was preaching to here with that little bit of homily that we just went through. All right, we got a couple more little check-ins we need to do with a couple other towns, but at this point, come on. The question, did Galatians work? I think it's answered. It's answered archaeologically, it's answered from written evidence, it's answered from what we see inside the Bible. Yeah, it took. It worked. Great job, Paul. This is really exciting. But I'm not quite done beating this dead horse yet, so we are going to do just a bit more before we land the plane on this season and are on to Finally Eamon. Okay, I think that's finally plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.