Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and today is the last day that we are on the list of very bad things from Galatians chapter 5, the list that Paul titles The Acts of the Flesh, or The Acts of the Sinful Nature. It's been a little bit juicy. There are actually a bunch more lists like this in Paul's letters and other places. We'll probably talk about the other lists tomorrow. But today, finally, got a little distracted yesterday because I was excited about some stuff that I saw. But today, finally, we're going to wrap this thing up. Here's something that I've learned about people. They do weird crap. Real weird crap. And by they, I guess I mean we, but most of us don't have the same list of weird crap as other people. And admittedly, some people's like weird blow-off steam stuff that they do is it's a lot more tame. There's not a lot of consequences to it. Whereas some folks wow, they go big. I lived in Las Vegas for a year. Only a year. There's a reason for that. No disrespect if you live in Las Vegas or if you love Las Vegas. I've got a bunch of friends there still. People I really care about, who've carved out a wonderful life living in Las Vegas. But if you're not from my country, from the United States, and if you don't know, Las Vegas has a bit of a reputation for being the modern day sodom, maybe the Corinth of the modern world. It's a place of indulgence. We've talked about it on this podcast before. There's a campaign to market to people to say, to signal it, you know, hey, the Las Vegas that you might remember from when you were a kid when we had campy clown shows and circus-oriented casinos for the kids, and the Excalibur was our new casino, and we had knights in shining armors and goofy stuff for the whole family. We're not that Vegas anymore. Now we're edgy. This is a place where you come and do bad things, and then you leave, and it's like it never happened. And in this campaign slogan, they said, What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. So they were blatantly marketing the idea that this is a place you go to blow off steam and just do the weird crap you're gonna do and then just get on with it like it never happened. I don't think that's how life actually works, but that was very much the island of lost boys message that Vegas was teasing out there for a while. And let me tell you, in my year in Vegas, it was rough. Like I said, there were cool people, there were redemptive things, some beautiful architecture, and there were really cool things at the church that I was at that were going on. I mean, there were good things. Also, I saw horrors of human making that I did not imagine could be so horrible. I saw horrible, shocking levels of exploitation of people from other countries. I saw the hints and I heard the whispers of horrible things that were done to women and children, of horrible things that seemingly reputable people were doing behind the scenes. It was crazy. And for my money, again, I know I see this differently than my friends who live in Vegas, or maybe you if you see it a little more positively than I do, but for my money, there was a pall over the whole city. For my money, the people who'd been there for a long time had kind of adjusted to it, but did not realize fully what they were swimming in. And there was a bleakness to it, there's an ick to it. Again, it's just one man's opinion. Maybe I'm seeing it wrong, but here's what I think didn't work about it. When you pitch the idea that this is a town where you indulge and then you leave, what you're doing is you're selling a transience. The idea of this is a thing that isn't even you. You just come here and you don't be you, you be the monster you would be if you didn't have all these entanglements and other things holding you back. And then you get that out of your system, you go back to being whatever you need to be in your normal day-to-day life. In my opinion, that idea, that vibe flows through everything and it creates this sense of transience so that even the people who are there aren't really there for the most part. It's very guarded, it's very strange, it's also very hot. So you get into your little box that is your house, and then you go to your box with wheels that is in your garage, and you quickly open the garage door and you drive in your climate-controlled box to your parking box and go into your work box and then go back to your car box and then drive back to your live box. Very isolated, very strange, very unusual. And I think so much of that weirdness that I experienced there, at least, flowed from being there at exactly the time when Vegas was trying to rebrand itself as this place where you just go and indulge the darker things that might come to mind. I think that is exactly the kind of stuff that is the last quadrant of this Acts of the Flesh list that Paul has given us. It's pretty easy to lump together the first three clumps of bad things that we get here. I mean, come on, connect the dots. What could these first few have in common? Sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery. Okay. I think it's pretty easy to see what's going on there on this list. Galatians 5.19, the first part of the list is weird sex stuff. It's sexual brokenness, it's hurt people, hurting people, it's the just the weirdness and oddness of what sexuality is in general. People are going to get that wrong sometimes. It's a hurtful, deep, abiding wrong that can be really tough to sort through, can leave a mark, and can leave a real lasting effect on a person's soul. It is what it is. God's peace, grace, and forgiveness to everybody. Okay, so the sex thing, that's the first one. The second list, not too hard to figure out. It's idolatry and witchcraft. That's verse 20. Okay, well, yeah, these are ancient pagan practices that were totally woven into the assumptions of society, and Christians, new in their faith, who had fully integrated this as well. I mean, it was as normal as driving a car. It was as normal as logging on to the internet. It was as normal as carrying around a wireless device. Well, these practices of idolatry and witchcraft, Paul says they might be normal, but they are representative of the acts of the flesh, and they don't fit. They're not compatible, they're not representative of life by the spirit, no matter how normal they seem. Okay, so list number two, not too tough. Pagan practices, okay. List number three, the third quadrant of this list. Hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy. And it's so weird, by the way, that and envy creeps over into verse 21. I've heard that the guy who made the verses was on horseback on his way to Paris and he just had to bang all of this stuff out real quick while he was like, you know, driving back in the day. So I think this might be one of the places where maybe the horse hit a bump and he meant to write verse 21 after and envy, not before it. That's just such a bizarre verse break to me. Idolatry and witchcraft. I'm I'm just gonna read it. This is Galatians 5 20. Hear me out. Idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions. Where's the last two words? Oh, they're in verse 21. And envy. Drunkenness, orgies, and the like. Okay, I don't, it's whatever. I think and envy is clearly lumped in with the third quadrant of the list of very bad things, the acts of the flesh that Paul is giving us here. We chose not to talk about that a whole bunch again because we covered that a lot when Paul turns over his cards a little earlier in Galatians chapter five, and I was like, you guys are being awful to each other. You're biting and devouring each other, and you're gonna end up destroying each other. It's an indulgence of the flesh to treat each other socially the way you're treating each other. So Paul was aware, apparently, of much more screwed-upness that was going on in this Galatian church that went beyond theology questions. It was into how they treated each other questions. And we dealt with that several episodes back when we were earlier over there. So, okay, there that one's pretty easy to lump together. That's the third quadrant. So we got sex stuff, we got pagan practices stuff, we got social stuff and mistreatment of others. Then this final quadrant, I've read a bunch of different books on Galatians, I've sought out a bunch of different people's opinions. Nobody seems to exactly agree on the language for how to lump this final quadrant, this final batch of very bad things. So I don't know, we'll see what you make of it. Here's verse 21, even with the clumsy little extra bit here at the beginning, because of the bump on horseback hundreds of years ago. Verse 21, Galatians 5, and envy, semicolon. Drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you as I did before that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. So uh yeah, okay, I'm gonna bump envy back to quadrant three. Drunkenness, orgies, and the like. Dang it, I forgot to give you the orgy warning at the beginning of this one. I'm not very good at internet. I picked up I hope you still remember the warning from the other day. And you were like, today's today's probably the day for that. Not gonna have the kids listening if they are. Dang it. Well, whatever. So, anyways, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I've heard the best take I've heard on this is that this is the sin of indulgence. This is the Vegas sin list. This is the I'm gonna act one way almost all of the time, but you know what? Sometimes a dude has just got to do what a dude has gotta do. Sometimes you just gotta blow off some steam and cut loose and get hammered and go to a big orgy party. I I think that was the rationale that Paul was pushing back on here. I think probably the best way to read this is Paul was saying there's some kind of festival cycle that's pagan that you guys are a part of, and it involves doing some pretty screwed up stuff that might be normal in your culture, but it is not compatible with life by the Spirit. It's not compatible with the values of the kingdom and the commands of Christ, and that stuff's gotta go, even if you do it way less than most people. Even if it's only like one time a year on a work trip with the guys, it's too much. Even if it's just one thing that the ladies go and do and woo, just do like one once every couple of years, girls' trip kind of thing. It's gotta go. It doesn't fit, it's not compatible, it's a departure, it isn't an evidence of life by the spirit, it's in competition with life by the spirit, it's a clear outgrowth and indulgence of the flesh. And so to me, given where we're talking about Galatia, that's who this list is catered to. This is by no means a universal list. We'll talk about that more tomorrow. This is a list that Paul's putting together for them, based on the stuff that he knows that they are going to be tempted by, the stuff that they're going to get wrong. There's a bunch of other things that come up in other books of the New Testament from Paul that we'll again get to tomorrow, that aren't in this list. Why? I don't know, it probably didn't really trip anybody up. Probably wasn't really anybody's thing. So if I just reverse read this letter, because remember, Galatians is half of a conversation, we have to kind of cobble together what the Judaizers were saying and what the new Christian leaders and Gentiles in this church were saying. If we just reflect back on what this must mean and kind of fill in the other side of the conversation, I get the impression that the people in this region tended to have looser sexual morals than those prescribed by the Old Testament and the New Testament. I get the impression that because of the very ancient Gallic influences, the Roman influences, the Greek influences, pagan influences from people groups we don't even remember the names of. It all mushed together, and these people were saturated in a whole bunch of different pagan practices. And also we can look at this and say, okay, they had a mean streak hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy. Okay, well, they had a bit of a temper. Some people groups have a reputation for that. Other people groups have a reputation for more of a cold anger. Looks like maybe this is a group that had kind of a social media age reputation of being pretty petty and bakery. Sometimes it goes hot, sometimes it's cold and behind the back. It doesn't seem like they managed disagreement very well at all. It doesn't seem like they were forgiving with each other at all. So that was tripping them up. And then it seems like this was a culture that kind of had that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas mentality as well, where there was sort of a pass given to people for just from time to time having to do something truly chaotic and destructive in the midst of revelry to just, you know, blow off steam and keep it together. And so Paul, it looks like has customized a list to say, hey, for you guys, the Galatians, these are the things that I see and hear about happening in your culture and in your church that are the most obvious outgrowths of the flesh that tend to manifest where you're at. Again, like I said, tomorrow we're going to look at some of the other lists in the New Testament. We'll see that they're a little different as Paul caters it to different sets of circumstances. But the point is, hey Galatians, life by the Spirit is where it's at. This is the answer to the stuff. This is where the Christian life is headed. This is what it's supposed to look like. And if that list of really bad things is ugly and uncomfortable, okay. Well, yeah, most lists like that, I guess, are gonna be pretty ugly and uncomfortable. But just put it in one hand and hold it out at arm's length and scrutinize it while you put in the other hand this upcoming list of the fruits of the spirit and scrutinize it and just see which one of those two hands is holding something that's more beautiful, more Christ-like, and more what you want things to look like. The fruit of the spirit is gonna look all the more appealing, taste all the sweeter after we've grinded through this uncomfortable walk through the list of very bad things. All right, I think that's plenty for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.