Hello, my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are in season five of this podcast, which is on the book of Galatians. And some of you probably thought, Well, this has gotta be about done several weeks ago because we finished the book of Galatians. But then you found out, no, we're not done, because this podcast follows one, the Bible, and two, my curiosity. And we got to the end of Galatians, and I started thinking, Well, I still have curiosity. And my curiosity was to track down a question I've never tracked down before, which is, how did it work out for the people who got this letter? How did the whole Christianity thing play out there after the Bible was over? And so you and I, for the last couple weeks, something like that, have been tracking down Bible clues for whether or not the message of Paul in the book of Galatians worked. Did it stick with the original audience? Did Paul's argumentation win the day, or did the Judaizers come back in and circumcise everybody at a big bloody circumcision fest right there in church? And then the wheels fell off and it totally went to garbage. Well, it looks like it was the prior. According to the Bible, Paul's argument one, Paul went out on the second missionary journey to circulate the decisions of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. They all seem to like Paul very much. They all seem to agree with him very much. So it's been very fun doing the actual legwork together here in the Bible over the last week or two, tracking down these clues to determine that, yeah, it looks like Galatians 1. Paul won the day with the letter, Paul won the argument. Clue number one was at the Jerusalem Council affirmed the letter to the Galatians. Yes, I wrote these down, I've got them in front of me in my little notebook. Clue number two that we came across is from the second missionary journey when we found out that Timothy, job opening, is from Lystra. Lystra is almost surely one of the churches in view with the letter of Galatians. So the fact that Timothy was still there and there's a thriving community of faith means that they got it right. Paul wouldn't have taken somebody who had been swayed by the circumcision arguments that the Judaizers were making with him, but he did take Timothy with him. All right, clue number three comes right after that in Acts 6.5, where it's or 6.5, what am I doing? Whitman, come on, read the thing. It's in plain English by your own hand. Acts 16.5, where it says, So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers. And the context there is the Galatian churches. That indicates that Galatians stuck. And then clue number four is a deduction that we made from the second missionary journey about where things seemed to work on that journey, and which stops were relatively unproductive. And the only time that we know that Paul was in the neighborhood of the place where some people theorize Galatians was written to, that being North Galatia, not much happened. That leg of the trip wasn't very productive, but the southern leg of the trip was very productive. And the southern leg of the trip, the first part of the trip, was in South Galatia, where these churches are. So clue number four, there is kind of a negative argument and a positive argument. Positively, the Southern Galatian churches were thriving when Paul went back through. Negatively, nothing of note happened, apparently, in what we could call North Galatia. And I think if the fire were still burning and the letter was written to North Galatia, and everybody up there was like, no, we reject your dumb letter of Galatians, we'd have a lot more fireworks in Acts 16, there in the second missionary journey, with Paul going up there to duke it out and make sure he won those arguments. Clue number five is that the same message of the book of Galatians worked pretty much everywhere else. Everywhere that Paul went and engaged with this, he might not have convinced everybody, he might not have convinced all of his old classmates. But what we do see happen is a whole bunch of churches get established, and they all get established by embracing the gospel that is articulated in Galatians. So there's our five biblical clues that we've been working on. But now our quest takes a slightly different turn. Now it's time to go beyond the timeline of the Bible and consider what we find in these towns that I think Galatians was written to, but we'll also go even consider the towns that I don't think Galatians were written to up north. We know a couple of towns up there that were prominent. Heck, why not? We can go dig around and get the internet for that. We'll go see if we can find anything up there. So over the next few days, we've got to do a deep dive into Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch. Those are the four churches that are either in Galatia or right on the fringes of being in Galatia that we know Paul went to again and again and again. And then like I said, we'll go and explore a couple others that don't really come up in the Bible. But if Paul were writing Galatians to somewhere else, I guess it would have been those two towns. Those would be the best candidates. So we'll go see what was happening there. But before we go any further here, let's just do a little Bible trivia or Bible intuition here. And I know that some of you have been around the Bible forever, and some of you are pretty new to this. I actually think this will be trickier for the people who've been around the Bible forever, but here we go. What do you picture as being the churches Paul most visited or the towns Paul most visited on all of his journeys throughout the book of Acts? Where does your head go? For me without if I didn't think about it at all, the ones that would pop would be Corinth and Ephesus. And you know, obviously there's the sending community of Antioch, where they were first called Christians, but I don't count that. That's like the launching spot, it's not part of the journey. He goes to Jerusalem a lot, but that's not really part of the missionary journeys. He's kind of checking back in with the home office when he goes there. Setting those two aside, it's Corinth and Ephesus, right? We know from the New Testament that he was there a lot. Those two towns are the two places he kind of set up shop and did work. I mean, he was in a lot of these places for a decent chunk of time compared to how quickly you and I travel now when we go on like vacation or something, or a short-term mission trip. But in Corinth and Ephesus, I mean he was there for you know years combined between the two. But I'm just asking you, which towns did he visit the most, even if he was just there very briefly? Well, my math says it was actually the towns that we're talking about here in Galatia Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch. Those four towns are listed very explicitly in the first missionary journey. And if you go and pull up a missionary journey map, they don't draw it right, because if they were really gonna draw it, they should just draw squiggly lines between these four cities a whole bunch. Because Paul bounced back and forth among them a lot, and it's kind of hard to even nail down how many times he dipped in and out between these four cities, because sometimes they liked him and hailed him as a god incarnate, other times they hit him with rocks a lot. Derby seems to have accepted the message pretty quickly. They might have been the most receptive town of all the towns of all of his journeys ever, if you really think about it, which is pretty wild, because that's pretty early on in the game that Paul went to Derby. But if we only count those each as one visit, which I don't think is fair, I think it's actually more than one visit, you can show it from the text. And then we also add that to his second missionary journey, where we know for sure he went to Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch. Then already through the first two missionary journeys, these towns are they're going to be at the top of the list of total number of visits. And then finally, starting in Acts chapter 18, where we get the somewhat accelerated account of Paul's third missionary journey, it opens with him maybe quickly, maybe it took a long time, but he definitely went through this area again. Derby, Lystra, Iconium, Pisidian, Antioch. Maybe the fact that we don't get a lot of details there, and maybe the fact that he doesn't seem to stay for really all that long comparatively says that stuff was good. Paul was not a guy who liked to sit and be comfortable. Maybe this is clue number six, actually, in a way. Paul wasn't a guy who'd be like, yeah, things are great here. I'll just sit tight and relax. I don't really like trying hard or doing things or pounding pavement. I only sort of believe in Jesus and don't feel that much compulsion to go tell everybody about him. No! Paul was always on the move. He was a mover and shaker. He would figure out how to keep going and doing what needs to be done. He set up shop at times to strengthen the church. He'd figured out that Corinth and Ephesus were good landing spots where he could regionally affect a whole bunch of things now that he had helpers and stuff who he could dispatch from there with letters. But Paul was always on the move. So on the beginning of the third missionary journey, he flies through these towns comparatively. My assumption would be because stuff was going great. On that third missionary journey, Paul almost surely went west out of Pisidian Antioch, which is pretty much dead center, the part of modern-day Turkey that we've been talking about this whole time. And he would have gone west from there toward Ephesus. He would have passed right by Colossae. I don't think he ever actually went to Colossae. More in that in the next season on Philemon. At Ephesus, things got a little bit crazy and kind of started to bog down. And the rest of this journey is fraught with all sorts of adventures and peril before Paul finally makes his way back toward home and then he gets arrested. And Paul's story rounds out with a couple of very long arrests, a journey to Rome as a prisoner. Maybe he gets released for a while and does one more journey. We'll explore that more when we get into Colossians. All of that to say, Ephesus and Corinth, they're real sexy. They sound cool. Those are the places that you think of. They got books of the Bible named after them. But really, part of the reason that we think of those two churches so much is because so much ugly stuff happened there. Corinth was a disaster. It's not that he visited there the most. It's that things always seem to be going wrong in Corinth. And he did go there a lot, too. So they got two books of the Bible and then more that didn't even make it into the Bible. Whereas maybe the fact that we only get one letter and it's a lump letter to Lystra, Iconium, Derby, and Pisidian Antioch means that they listened better and got it better. Well, well, whatever the case, which is a wonderful reset phrase that I have discovered I use a lot lately. Hm, huh? Whatever the case, whatever the case, these four towns were clearly near and dear to Paul's heart. He showed up there a lot. It seems like things went okay as far as we can track it in the Bible, even though we hear more about Ephesus and Corinth, Philippi, even Thessalonica later on. So if these churches were that big a deal, you would think there would be something left. There ought to be something we can dig up. There should be a rock or a engraving or something that points to the church thriving there in the immediate aftermath of the Bible. And I've done some metaphorical digging around about the literal digging around other people have done, and I'm pleased to announce that I have things to report. Alright, tomorrow we're gonna go to Derby and find out what the heck happened there as we continue on our quest to figure out whether the book of Galatians worked. Alright, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.