Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we're trying to figure out whether or not Galatians worked. We have one clue that says it probably did, that being that the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 seems to affirm the letter of Galatians. That's great. Nice job, Galatians. This is encouraging, but I'm not satisfied with that. We got to dig deeper. And so right now we're in the middle of a two-day conversation, trying to look at clue number two, which centers around a promising young man produced by Galatian churches probably after they received the letter of Galatians. So we're working that through. We started it yesterday. We're going to finish it today. If you missed yesterday's, today's going to make a lot more sense if you go back and catch that one first. All right, Jeffrey, music please, and we'll get right back to it. So there's a disciple named Timothy. He lived there. His mother was a Jewess and a believer, but his father was Greek. Now see, that is pretty interesting. This kid Timothy is uncircumcised, but we find out that he's from this wonderful pedigree of faith, of faithfulness toward God. His grandmother was a woman named Lois. His mother was a woman named Eunice, and apparently they really taught him up in the Bible, the scriptures, and what you have here is a young man who, like Nehemiah in the Old Testament, seems to maybe have a sense of the moment and where he fits into it. But also his dad is Greek. We don't learn much about him. Who knows what happened to his dad? Maybe Paul kind of comes in and in a mentor way fills that role. But this is a dude who has a foot in both worlds. I mean Paul has a foot in both worlds politically, but not ethnically. He's Jewish. And you and I, you know, we live in the age of multiculturalism and kind of a mushing together of all of the world's cultures, and so we're very conditioned to think, man, why are people getting all bent out of shape about like who's from where or what the deal is? That's racist. And I I guess I would just say I don't think our 21st century notions of racism really neatly apply or lay over the top of the ancient world, the classical world, the first century Roman world is a different set of considerations and factors. Maybe our sense of what is and isn't racist is a little bit informed as well by the fact that we had racial ethnic slavery in our country, and so we remember that and see the fallout from that horrible practice. Whereas in the Roman world, the statuses weren't drawn on ethnic lines so much. I I it's a bigger thing to unpack. Maybe we'll get into it in Philemon. But the race question was, I mean, it was tense in a different way back then, and it was a common sensibility that everybody had. This group of people's like this, that group of people's like this, these people from this island, even Paul himself in the Bible, is like, this is how Cretans are, this is just what they do there. And you add into that the ethnic nature of faith in God in the Old Testament, that the family of faith was a bloodline-oriented faith with a family tree, and all of that was very important and God ordained, and God even defended the boundaries of that ethnic family. So again, very different categories than how we think of it now, but you add all of that up together, and what you've got is a situation where it would be incredibly helpful to Paul for what he's doing and for what he's learned on his first missionary journey if there was a young dude who he could train up from a different generation who knew the material, who was raised around the material, but also who is half Jewish and half Gentile. I mean it's the perfect guy to speak into what the situation is at that moment. And again, a job opening! Yep, Paul has this roster spot available. So uh the brothers at Lystra and Iconium, this is Acts 16, too, spoke well of him. Yeah, obviously. And Paul wanted to take him along on the journey. So he circumcised him, so Paul circumcised Timothy, because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek. Did you did you feel the the needle scratch on the record right there in our conversation, in our year-long three hundred-ish episode conversation? Did you feel that? So I'm to understand that Paul, who wrote the book of Galatians, he gets done getting the big win at the Jerusalem Council one chapter earlier in Acts 15, and then he goes and meets a promising young man who isn't circumcised because he's half Gentile, and Paul's like, Cool, we're gonna uh um we're gonna do this thing. I brought my tools. I mean, it doesn't say Paul had him circumcised, it says Paul did it. So he circumcised him. So Paul circumcised Timothy. Wow. That's an image. Huh. Okay. Well, I'm just gonna tell you right now that what we're looking at here is my first Bible faith crisis. This is fun, right? Maybe you've got your own. Like, you know, everybody's got kind of their their first moment of awakening to a thing. I think for so many men of my generation, their first awakening to the reality that girls are pretty was Jessica Rabbit or Winnie Cooper. And likewise, a whole bunch of us who were raised in the generation of pre-internet youth group had some moment where we were cruising through the Bible in these happy Bible stories, and we hit our first snag, and we're like, wait a second, that doesn't seem to square with this other thing that I just read. What is going on? So metaphorically, this is my Winnie Cooper or Jessica Rabbit of Bible faith crisis. When I read this as a kid, I was troubled. I was like, well, that diminishes my respect for Paul. What's he doing? And admittedly, my categories back then were very uh they were very binary. They were one and zero. And I'm I was reading the Bible trying to figure out what I should do and not do. What opinion should I have and not have? Because I just wanted to be right, maybe somewhat out of pride, but also because I think it's true, and I don't want to screw it up. I want to be a faithful representative of this stuff. I want to practice true Christianity. And so I think what bothered me so much about the passage I just read to you is that I didn't know what to do with it. It made my compass spin. It made me feel bad. It made me feel like, uh, never get to know your heroes. Ugh. Paul, I really looked up to you. You sold out, you compromised. It took me a minute to work through it. I would say it took me a long minute. I I don't think I solved it in any way or to a satisfactory way for my soul for a long time. And I just sat there and was like, yeah, that's a part of the Bible that's hard for me. I don't know what to tell ya. Well, I'll tell you this now. This is not a part of the Bible that is hard for me at this point. What changed? One, I lived a little bit and I led organizations and I led churches and I talked about things on the internet and I tried to internalize and live out the principles of shrewdness and innocence. I learned in leadership that sometimes you can do things you're not actually obligated in any way to do as a strategic move to try to make the thing work better. Sometimes a low-cost concession, I mean, easy for me to say, I'm not the one getting adult circumcised in this equation, but sometimes in the grand scheme of things, a relatively low-cost concession to satisfy the sensibilities or agitations or whatever of people you'd really like to talk with is worth it for the larger payoff of what you get. And so why doesn't this bother me anymore? Well, one, because there's no theological proclamation here. There's no thing that's like Paul wanted him to be a real Christian, so he circumcised him. If it said that, I'm my faith crisis over this would not be over with, but it doesn't. You read it in context and then you look at Paul's relationship with Timothy moving forward, which is recorded in the very practical book of 1 Timothy and the very personal, deeply emotional book of 2 Timothy, as Paul is about to die and he's handing off the mantle to Timothy. You see this relationship, and you realize, man, this is a very practically minded partnership. Paul wanted to take him along on the journey. Paul is still mostly preaching, he's starting in the synagogues, he's mostly preaching to Jews, and I assume Timothy held still for the procedure. So he was in on it. He agreed to all of this. I doubt he was held in place and circumcised against his will. I don't think Paul and Timothy would have the relationship they have moving forward if that were the case. So it looks like Paul and Timothy gamed it out, and Paul was like, hey, strategically, I think this is the right play. I think we take away this ammunition that these people, I know how they are, I am them, I went to school with them, I hurt people, maybe even killed on their behalf. I know what they're gonna say. Let me throw out a crazy idea, Timothy. What do you think? And maybe Timothy comes back and he's like, that's a big commitment. Let me think about that. And then maybe Timothy comes back and he's like, okay, many have given up much more than I'm about to give up in the cause of this thing. I know I don't have to, but let's do it to preempt these objections in advance. Now, is this circumcision that was not theologically necessary or necessary for salvation for Timothy? Was it strategically right? Well, we could do another whole podcast series or rabbit trail on did Timothy work out? But I think we can just sort of skip to the end on that, and I'm just gonna tell you. Yes, Timothy worked out. He was a faithful companion of Paul all the way to the end. When everybody else, almost everybody else, had abandoned Paul, Timothy was the one guy who came through when Paul had to make that 3 a.m. phone call to the one person he knew would deliver. Who did he call? Timothy. When Paul had difficult church situations, but Paul could only be in one place at once. Who was his most trusted guy he could dispatch to that town to put out fires and fix what was happening and deal with the big personalities? Timothy, even when Timothy was young, Paul trusted the guy. And by all accounts, Timothy lived to old age, almost 100 AD. And the story goes that he died standing and preaching the gospel in opposition to a pagan procession celebrating the goddess Diana. That's pretty crazy if that's what happened, because Paul almost dies here just a couple pages later in the book of Acts, opposing the pagan worship of Diana and promoting the worship of Christ in Ephesus. The point is with Timothy, you've got a very symmetrical, beautiful story of a life well lived, a life of great sacrifice, even serving to position himself for the very people who would want him dead. That's how Timothy was, reliable, beginning to end. I wish I was this dude. I wish that on my very best day I was Timothy on his very worst day. He's a legend, he's a saint, he's a founder of the church used by God, and he's the co-author of probably okay, I don't know it off the top of my head, but five books of the New Testament. A Corinthians, Philemon for sure, at least one of the Thessalonians, and he's named on Philippians and Colossians, maybe more. Yeah, it worked out with Timothy. So did Paul make the right call with this? Um yeah, at this point I'm at peace saying that he did. Acts 16, 4. As they traveled from town to town, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey. So the churches were strengthened. This is very important for a big question. Did Galatians work? So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers. Clue number two to answer the question of Did Galatians work, goes as follows. Yes, Galatians worked, because after it was delivered to the churches in question and internalized, they produced Timothy, the heir apparent to the work of Paul. And when Paul delivered the findings of the Jerusalem Council to the churches that were the recipients of the letter of Galatians, they were, quote, strengthened in faith and grew daily in numbers. So we have a biblical account that they heard the final judgment from Jerusalem and assented to it and were strengthened because of it, and they produced Timothy. So maybe that counts as clue number two and number three. I'm going to count it as, hang on, I'm changing my notes. Clue number three, acts 16, 5. That's the verse I keep reading you about. They were strengthened in faith and grew daily in numbers. Clue number one that says Galatians worked is the Jerusalem Council affirmed Galatians. Clue number two is that Paul went back to those towns to deliver the letter, and Timothy was there. If those churches had fallen apart, I wouldn't expect that you would find a Timothy there ready to step into the job opening to the empty roster spot and help Paul the way Timothy did. Clue number three, Acts 16.5 says explicitly that when the message of the Jerusalem Council, which kind of is the message of Galatians, was delivered to the churches that I think were the recipient of the letter of Galatians, they were like, Roger that. So so far, it sure seems like Galatians is working out. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.