This is the fifth season of this podcast, and we are not far from starting the sixth season of this podcast. I have decided what the next book of the Bible is going to be. I will formally announce that soon. But in the meantime, I'm just looking back today as I'm getting ready to turn on the microphone here and thinking about what we're going to talk about. I'm looking back at the other seasons we've done. We did Matthew. It's a story. It's right through the front door. If you can follow with a story and a plot and characters who have consistent motivations, then you can follow Matthew. Same is basically true with Ezra and Esther and Nehemiah. It's just a lot older, and it's in a more foreign cultural context, because all of that happened 500-ish years before Galatians, and we don't know a ton about ancient Persia, but even then, the personalities are still there. We can still piece it together. Galatians, though, this season has been a different animal because this isn't a story. The plot isn't as obvious in Galatians. It's a letter from the Apostle Paul to not even just one church, but a handful of churches in a region that at some point he helped establish. And we don't get the other side of the conversation. So as we're going through it, there's a whole bunch of stuff in Galatians where I think it's really easy for you and me to figure out what's going on and for you and me to feel what is going on just intuitively as we read it. We come upon some of these things that Paul's saying, and we're like, oh yeah, well, I say stuff like that when I'm really making an impassioned argument. And if somebody does this, I will often say things just like that. I totally see what you're doing here, Paul. But again, because we're only getting half of the conversation, there are other moments where this is kind of tricky because we don't know what Paul is responding to, but what we do know is that his speedometer throughout this entire letter is somewhere between 80 and 100 miles per hour. He is never feathering it back to, you know, let's take a chapter and just do 25, like a school zone or something, and catch our breath a little bit. It is passion, passion, passion. Argumentation, argumentation. And like we talked about yesterday, I think we gotta salute him for that. Because people were lining up to get adult circumcised here. And Paul knew that is a Rubicon. That is a blood ritual where if you cross that line, you will then psychologically talk yourself into having been right, no matter how much deep down you might eventually become persuaded you were wrong. Do you know what I mean by that? I use it the expression, blood has been shed, but it's not always literally blood that's been shed. Like if you can convince somebody to do something that is very public and very big and very personal, that in the most serious of ways is metaphorically planting a flag in the ground and saying, I am this now. Like, for example, cutting on your body. That would be the kind of thing that's sort of planting a flag, right? It becomes really hard to come back. I don't remember who said it. It seems like it'd be one of the things that like Will Rogers would say, or Yogi Berra or something, or Mark Twain, but it's one of those quotes that's something like it's way easier to convince someone of a lie than it is to convince them they've been lied to. Uh what do you call it? The behavioralist, the psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. He talks about the elephant and that our emotions and our intellect are like riding an elephant. And we can't really steer truly the elephant, but rather we kind of talk ourselves into making it look like we steered the elephant, even though the elephant kind of goes where it wants to go. We make emotional decisions first. If we proclaim those emotional decisions publicly, then human psychology says that all pretty much all of us, no matter how emotionally mature we are, we will bring our logical reasoning into line with that thing we already did, that blood we already shed, that public ritual we already did to make it work. I think Paul understood these Galatians were vulnerable. They were weak, and he knew that if they crossed this line, particularly this line of circumcision, not just talking about maybe doing this someday, or not just talking about the law, but if they would put physical action to this theological chit-chat and confusion and start cutting skin, if they shed blood and everybody knew they did it, he knew there would be a very slim chance that they would ever come back. And even if Paul made it there in a year or two years or traveled as quickly as he could, you know, once that cut had happened, once that flag had been planted, they're not coming back. So, yeah, sure, Paul is 80 to 100 miles an hour through this entire letter. It's full of passion. He is pushing every button to try to reason to try to raise the alarm with these people who he cares about to say, don't fall for this thing. He also isn't doing this in real time. He's firing off one letter and he's trying to cover all of the bases he can think of imaginatively. He's trying to counter everything that his enemies are doing, but he doesn't know everything his enemies have said. He doesn't know everything the Judaizers have done because this conversation is happening asynchronously. The agitators are there in real time. They can respond to everything, they can think of the next clever thing to say at night, and then the next day they can roll out the new clever thing to say. Paul gets one crack at it, and it's one letter, and he's trying to cover all of it at once. My point is this right now as we're working through Galatians 5, 1 through 12, I feel like from phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, we go from one where I think to myself, Oh, I get it. I see why you would say that. That makes perfect sense in the moment, even only having one half of the conversation. Yeah, I could see myself saying something like that. I get it. And then the very next sentence, I'll be like, that doesn't seem as natural to me. Why are you saying that? And I have to think way harder about what was going on in this conversation and the reality, the logistical reality, even of the three parties involved. Paul, who is trying to influence the thing and save and rescue the Galatians, the Galatians who are like gullible sheep, they don't quite know what to do, and the Judaizers, they're there in the same room. Huge advantage for the Judaizers, right? You can see this, right? Anytime we get to a part in Galatians where it seems like Paul is maybe sounding a little bit erratic, I think we gotta give him the benefit of the doubt because he is at such a disadvantage and because his quest is so noble in this situation. And maybe the reason I want to bring this up, I realize we're not making a lot of progress here today, but I mean this is important to me. I think part of the reason I want to bring this up at this point is because I've gone and picked up a few books and just read what other people thought about some of these trickier passages. I didn't feel compelled to do that really a whole lot with the other seasons we've done of this podcast, but I went out and spent some of that uh Patreon money y'all sent me in support of this program to buy a stack of books. I wanted to know like what's the whole gamut of opinions on this stuff, including ancient opinions. And you've heard some of that come through. I was reading Luther to you and whatever yesterday or a couple days ago. And I'm a little troubled to find that a bunch of reliable, you know, kind of we like the Bible type scholars who I've read, who have written about Galatians in the last 20 years, they're pretty rough on Paul. There's a little undercurrent, there's a little tone to a lot of these guys. I think it's been academically fashionable to come to Galatians and imagine that, you know, Paul's a little unhinged here. Somehow God and the Holy Spirit still worked through this letter, but Paul's coming off as uh a little worked up and he's making soft arguments and he's losing his train of thought from time to time. And I don't agree with these authors. I think they're too close to the math equation. If you step back and look at the proposition of what Galatians is, you're talking about an unfair fight. If you like the rest of the Bible and you like Jesus, Paul is the good guy here. He is in the right with the fundamentals of what he's arguing, if you think the rest of the Bible is from God and it's reliable. And I happen to think that. He does come off as fiery and feisty. It is hard to read. Remember, even Peter acknowledges this in one of his letters, saying that, you know, scripture sometimes can be tricky. You know, well, he says specifically, you know, Paul, even in his letters, it can be hard to understand, but you know, that can be the way it is with Scripture. And so you know, Peter is acknowledging that this is scripture, Galatians, that is. He's also acknowledging it's difficult to understand. Well, why is it difficult to understand? Okay, because it's complicated theology. Look, this has been a humbling read through this book for me. Okay? It just has been. I've gone to school for this. I've read the Bible a gajillion times. Heck, I just got done writing a book about the Bible that's going to be published, and people are going to read it and hope that I'm right about things. I don't know if I'm right about things. I'm bringing in a lot of other people to help me make sure I'm right about things. I don't want to say stupid stuff and get it all wrong. But even acknowledging all of that, all the time I've spent on this, all the time I've invested in it, I have to admit, this has been a really humbling season because this book's hard. It's harder than I thought it was going to be. It's harder to track, particularly not so much with the theology. It's it's hard to track with Paul's flow of thought at times. But if you run into Galatians and it's hard for you too, or if you're writing a book on Galatians, why would you just jump to the conclusion that it's hard because Paul is being erratic? Like, why would you not look at this and say, it's hard for me to understand because I'm not in the conversation and I don't have the other half of it. And Paul is writing from a hugely disadvantaged position here. He's responding to pushback he's received that's leaked back to him. He's responding to gossip that has trickled back to him. He's responding to just generally what he knows this ilk to be. Remember, I mean, these Judaizers are basically his classmates. They all went to the same school, they all have the same books on their shelves, scrolls, they all know the same guys. They have all got little nicknames for this institution or that institution, like, you know, I went to Ted's Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He knows these guys, he knows who they are. So he's responding to gossip he's heard about, he's responding to gossip that he suspects, he's responding and try to cut off at the past stuff that he knows guys like this will say because he went to school with them, because he worked with them, he knows what they're gonna do, he knows what their play is gonna be, he knows how they think. He's also trying to respond to stuff that he knows the agitators will see as a weakness in the Galatians because Paul knows the Galatian church. He knows what these sophisticated Judaizers who have the same education, the same set of superpowers Paul has, he knows that they're gonna roll into Galatia and they're gonna see the same strengths and weaknesses that Paul saw when he got there. And he knows probably what they're gonna attack. It's speculative on Paul's part, probably, but he's trying to cover a whole bunch of bases because if this letter doesn't work, a whole bunch of people are gonna get circumcised in the meantime before Paul can get a report back and write another letter. All of these letters are gonna have to be carried by a messenger. It takes a long time. The Judaizers have the advantage. So look, my point is this these next three verses or whatever that we're gonna look at, they're gonna be difficult, once again, to figure out exactly what he means. I think it's solvable and I think we can do it. But also I've been kind of disappointed to read some of what I've seen from some Bible scholars, some Christian scholars, who I just don't think are being very charitable toward Paul. Hey, he's on our side, guys. Like if you like the rest of the Bible, this is a good guy who could have protected his reputation by writing no letter at all, since this is basically a losing proposition. And I mean, you're probably not gonna win playing this particular game that's being played here. But instead, Paul loved these people. He loved the truth, and he loved the gospel, and he waded out into this very difficult battlefield where all the odds are stacked against him, and he's he's fighting blind half the time. He's I mean, hey, maybe there's a an actual metaphor there. I didn't mean it that way. You know, maybe he is actually fighting blind, but metaphorically, he's fighting blind and he's trying to preempt arguments, some of which he knows have been made, and others of which he doesn't even know have been made. And I, for one, as I've gone through this book with you and been humbled by this book alongside you, I'm gonna come out of this with more admiration and respect for Paul than I have ever had at any point in my life or any point in my journey with trying to understand the Bible and Christianity and how all of this works. This is brave, it's passionate, it's honest. He's trying to do something good here, and I think we can cobble together what that is and the logic of it over these next three verses we're going to be looking at in the coming days, and I think it's going to be very fruitful. If I could just rip through the whole Bible on my first try or my second try and be like, there, I know how everything is. It's all so simplistic. Well, I don't know. That makes it seem like maybe it's not real. Peter seemed to think that the challenge of scripture was a feature, not a bug, and I'm inclined to believe that as well. So all right, we'll look at these next three challenging phrases from Paul in Galatians chapter five next time around. I'm Matt, this is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.