Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. I hope stuff's going awesome for you, by the way. It is very springtime here where I am at, and everything is beautiful. It all smells great, it all looks great. We've had this rainy week, and all the flowers are bright and beautiful, and the animals are out, and the optimism that comes with springtime and into summer is here. I just love it. I hope that you're experiencing some of that as well. If you listen to this in deep in the southern hemisphere, I'm really sorry I just said all those things. Probably not having the desired effect on you, but you know, your time will come. Hey, we've been looking at Galatians 5, and it seems like, you know, from time to time, the places where the chapters divide in the Bible really square with the flow of thought, and at other times they don't. The chapters aren't inspired, the verse numbers aren't inspired. They were put there to try to make sense of it all and make it referenceable. And this might be one of those places where the positioning of the chapter break a little bit messes with the flow of Paul's argument. I would like to suggest that it might be better to have Galatians chapter 5 end at Galatians 5, 12, and then a new short Galatians chapter 6 start right after that, and then where Galatians 6 starts, Galatians 7 starts. That's confusing. Let me just explain what I mean. Here's the flow of thought as I see it coming down the home stretch here in Galatians. Paul makes all of his appeals about his own credibility, about what the gospel is, about the ineffectiveness of human effort to gain right standing with God in the first place. And now he's pivoting into his argument about the ineffectiveness of human effort to walk rightly with God over the course of the Christian life, to honor God with our lives. And he's saying that instead, what needs to happen is life by the Spirit. But here at the beginning of Galatians chapter five, it's like Paul is really wrapping up all of the stuff about freedom in Christ. He's wrapping up all of the stuff about the dangers of going back under the harsh tutor, the master that is the law. And he's saying, you know, obviously, guys, I've made my point over five chapters. Reject the people who are trying to rope you back into the law. Reject their blood ritual of circumcision. It doesn't make sense anymore. It puts you under something that is too heavy a burden to bear. Don't fall for it. And I feel like Paul really spikes the football and signals to us, the reader, that he's done with this line of arguing. You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth? That kind of persuasion doesn't come from the one who calls you. And now Paul has spoken to the agitators, he's spoken to the false teaching, he's clarified all of that, and he spikes the football. He ends the thought, he concludes that body of thought that is by saying in Galatians 5, 12, as for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves. I really think that's kind of it. And at that point, he's he's done. He's moving on now. Like, I mean, think about how you talk with people when it's a heated thing, or when you have gone on and on, and you know, talking in circles about a frustration or a thing that somebody you care about has been going through, and you finally get to that point where you're like, you know what? Here's my last word on the matter. That's it. Now moving forward, what do we do next? That's what that phrase feels like to me conversationally. So I think it would be great if there were a chapter break right there after the chopping verse. As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves. Because what starts next is this block of thought we've been working on for weeks now, which is the one where he's like, okay, but enough about them and what they taught and what they got wrong. We've straightened out their bad theology, that's all taken care of. Let's talk about you guys now, the recipients of this letter. Yeah, the agitators were bad, but you guys are being horrible to each other. Apparently there was huge strife in this church. And so if we started a new chapter right here in Galatians 5 13, that would make a lot of sense. You, my brothers, were called to be free, but don't use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature. Rather serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command, love your neighbor as yourself. And if you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you'll be destroyed by each other. That's a very fleshly image there, by the way, like people straight up biting at each other, eating each other, devouring each other. It's almost like a dark, evil, twisted up mirror world version of communion in terms of the imagery there. Yikes. But even though I think it might be good to have a chapter break right there, and for those verses I just read to be the beginning of you call it chapter six or whatever, that doesn't mean it's divorced from everything that happened before. This flow of thought is coming right out of what Paul's been talking about the whole time. And I think the question he's in part anticipating here is, okay, Paul, well, if the law isn't, if we're not under that anymore, and the law isn't going to be what checks our bad behavior and restrains and restricts our darker impulses, then what's to keep us from doing horrible things now? And here's Paul's answer. So I say live by the Spirit. And life by the Spirit, as we've discussed at great length, is the far better and superior and only possible way to do stuff that is really truly pleasing to God, to find the capacity to really truly love your neighbor as yourself, as commanded by God. And when you do that, when you, I should say, are that, that is someone walking by the spirit, all the stuff that the law is trying to restrict but can only do so much on is now actually dealt with and pushed to the margins because life by the spirit is so complete and it's so consuming. So then as the argument goes along, looks like Paul is saying, like if you can't tell the difference between spirit stuff and flesh stuff, let me help you out a little bit, because they both produce certain outcomes all the time. Flesh stuff produces flesh outcomes that are unattractive and frankly very obvious. Spirit stuff produces spirit outcomes that are beautiful and redemptive and demonstrative of the character of God and the values of his kingdom, and both of them just kinda happen. They're the natural outflow of a given thing. I'm tempted at this point to go into some clever pop culture analogy or some story from my childhood and be like, hey bro, check it out. This one time when I was a kid, I did this thing and it produced this thing, get it? But why would I do that? There's already a perfect metaphor right here. Paul uses it when he brings up the idea of fruit. If a tree that is genetically disposed to produce a kind of fruit is rooted and nourished by the right stuff, it's gonna produce that fruit. It can't help it. It just does it, it's always gonna do it. There's a time in the New Testament where there was a fig tree that was supposed to produce figs and it didn't. And famously Jesus was not impressed with it. Like, what's the point? It doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Something is broken about this. But as a rule, a tree will be betrayed by its fruit. What it is, you'll be able to figure out real quick based on what comes out of it. So, in light of all of that, Paul starts by giving us a real helpful, real simple list of stuff that is destructive and born out of the flesh. The old NIV says the acts of the sinful nature are obvious, and then it goes on to list them. The ESV and more recent translations render that the acts of the flesh are obvious. And as we've discussed, probably acts of the flesh better characterizes the argument that Paul is making throughout this thing. I'm not trying to pick a fight with Bible translators, it just seems evident to me. So tomorrow, and I know I've been promising this for like three days now, but tomorrow, we're gonna go through bit by bit this list of stuff that if it happens, this isn't hard. It's not hard to know where that's coming from or why that happened. These are all obvious markers, obvious products, obvious outgrowths, obvious fruit of the flesh, of world stuff, of life not by the spirit. And the list is a doozy, and it does include the O word. You're gonna be thinking for a minute about what is the O word? That'll be fun. Just ruminate on that. Okay, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.