Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I really thought yesterday I would finish out the rabbit trail arc that we've been on with Galatians 6 10, with this business at the end of Galatians where Paul says, Therefore, as you have occasion, do good to all people, but especially to people within the family of believers. We've been really working through this. And here at the end, these last few days, we've been thinking through a practical example of what it looked like when Christians in the centuries after the Bible was written actually did this stuff. In our last conversation about that today, which is picking up right where we left off yesterday, I just want to think through the implications of this because I think they are huge. So if you've been a little overwhelmed by the sociology and the stuff we've been doing the last few days, hey, I get it. No hard feelings. But hang with me for this one. I think we end up in a good place. I'm going to have Jeff play some music. We'll pick up right where we left off yesterday after that. He says, let's return to this hypothetical town of 10,000 people and let's talk about three different groups of interpersonal connections. You got Christians connected to Christians, Christians connected to pagans, and pagans connected to pagans. Okay, you got that? Three different sets of relationship groups. If we apply the mortality rates used above 10% for Christians, 30% mortality for pagans, then we can calculate the survival odds for each variety of attachments. You see what he's doing here? He's saying, Galatians 6 10, that since the Christians were to do good to all people, that's all people here is the pagans, and especially to those in the family of faith, he's assuming that Christians would minister to pagans, the ancient sources said they did, but that they would also absolutely minister to each other, then this is going to affect the survival rates across the board, not just for Christians, but it's also going to help the pagans. So get this. The survival rate for Christian to Christian relational bonds is going to be 81%. I'm not walking you through how we got there. It holds up. The survival rate for Christian to pagan relational bonds is still 63%. That's still pretty good. The survival rate for pagan to pagan bonds is 49%. And then he goes on to say that, you know, because of that, a pagan to pagan relationship is twice as likely to produce a death in the face of this situation as a Christian to Christian relationship. In other words, Christians are much more likely to survive. But then he goes on to say that we also know from the ancient sources that the pagan practice was to flee in the face of epidemic and the Christian practice was to stay. So that reduces the ratio even more. And Stark says that takes it down to only a 25% survival rate coming out of pagan to pagan relationships, whereas the Christian survival rate, because they would stay, is unchanged, is still at over 80%. Final thing from Stark here to round out, I know this might be a little bit confusing. That was kind of a lot. This will make it make more sense. Final thought from him. These rates assume, of course, that Christian victims of an epidemic received nursing care, while pagans did not. And all the ancient sources support that. In fact, however, our sources testify that some pagans were nursed by Christians. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people. Given the relative sizes of the Christian and pagan populations at the onset of the epidemic, Christians would not have had the resources to nurse all or even most sick pagans. Presumably, proximity and attachments would have determined which pagans would be cared for by Christians. That is, pagans who lived near Christians and or who had close Christian friends or even relatives would have been the most likely to be nursed. Let's assume that Christian nursing was as conducive to survival for pagans as it was for Christians. That means that pagans nursed by Christians had noticeably higher survival rates than other pagans. And you can reason out where Stark is going to go from there. I mean, it's hard to put a calculator on that, but when people save your life at great risk to themselves, you tend to be curious as to what would prompt them to do that. It's very reasonable to assume that there's going to be a lot of flips on the back end of that as pagans are like, my thing doesn't make sense. It doesn't work. This Christian thing makes sense. I just experienced it tangibly because as much as they were able to, they did good to me, an outsider, an enemy, a critic, even a persecutor. And now I'm alive because of their God. I'm alive because of what their God did in their lives, how they live is better. And it makes more sense. Their kingdom values are better than my pagan values. You gotta figure a whole lot of people who would have survived because of that are gonna look at it and the rest of their life is gonna be spent as a Christian. I mean, wouldn't you? Wouldn't that have an effect on the way you think? Even somebody who's very hardened, don't you think that would have a softening effect? Brushes with mortality tend to do that. Whatever the case, Stark runs the numbers the rest of the way out. He's a sociologist by trade, by the way. I don't know if I've told you that or not. So he's good at this. This is what he does. And he makes the determination that projected out over a couple of centuries of these epidemics in the persecution age of the Roman Empire, that Christianity, even without all the other factors, is going to win out simply because Christians did the things on a large scale that Jesus said to do in terms of how they treat outsiders, in terms of how they treat each other, because Christians did the things that Paul says to do in what might feel like this little throwaway verse here at the end of Galatians and Galatians 6.10. But because they did that, because they did good to all people as they had the opportunity, and especially to those who belong to the family of believers, because they did that, because a handful of Christians at exactly the right time, as a tiny minority in society, Christians you've never heard of, names that are forgotten, their graves are destroyed, Christians from 1800 years ago did this act of service. And I bet if we could put a video camera on all of history, there are some of us in this conversation right now who are Christians, because some forgotten Roman in some backwater province, some forgotten Roman Christian did what Jesus said, did what Paul said, they stood their ground in the face of suffering. They had a Christian outlook on life, death, mortality, and the truest, realist thing. And you're a Christian because they did this little thing for somebody else way back then, and then another thing happened, another thing happened, somebody else met somebody, somebody else did the thing, and it made it all the way to your parents or uh to you through somebody you met somewhere, something you heard on the internet. This is not inconsequential to me, is the point. This is not inconsequential to you. This isn't ancient disconnected history. This always was the plan. It's the truest, realest thing, and kingdom values are more powerful than the empires that rise and fall and come and go. They're more powerful than the sword. Every now and then it seems like the sword is what will get it done. But this historically did a whole lot of the heavy lift. And so this little thing that at the end of Galatians 6, 10, the, you know, that we've spent a week and a half or two weeks or whatever it's been on, to me, I just wanted to linger on it because this isn't a throwaway. This isn't some little thing to be like, oh, well, that's kind of how they thought about stuff back then. Now we try to be more fair. This was an instruction, this was a strategy point. This is how we do things. Good to everybody is you have opportunity, but especially to your brothers and sisters. When you look at this through the lenses of all of the unfolding of history, dang, that casts a very long shadow. That is quite the legacy and casts a shadow. That sounds kind of bleak and dark. In the best of ways, this is a ripple effect that, again, I stress, I am telling you, affects your life. And there are a whole bunch of us in this conversation who are Christians because of things completely forgotten that are just anonymous Christians from centuries past, facing life and death situations that required unbelievable courage, courage you and I can barely imagine. And they walked by the Spirit, they demonstrated the fruit of the Spirit, they rose to the occasion by the power of God, and a whole bunch of them probably died because of it and were forgotten. But you, me, the existence of the gospel, the message of Jesus, the values of the kingdom permeating the world today, that's their legacy. God let them help build his thing. He let them act like agents and heirs of the kingdom to build his household. And you and me are part of what they built. That's a really big deal. I know this is a weird trail to go down. It's a little different than what we normally do. Thank you for indulging me on this, especially on some of the parts where we're getting into like numbers that might be kind of hard to track with. They make sense in my brain. Maybe it doesn't translate to podcast. But thank you for indulging me on this. I think it's important, and I think it's very fitting as we get toward the end of Galatians to think about just a practical example of what are the consequences of this thing. It's not some abstraction from a long time ago that's unrelated to reality or the passage of time or your life now. No, it's very related in so many ways. And hey, we just got to track one little thread of that just a bit in our conversation here. Pressing ahead in Galatians next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Do this again soon.