If you're listening to the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, it's fast fun free daily deep dive Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_02Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I want to start by apologizing to those of you who are new to the program. It's a pity that this is your first day because we've got some pretty heavyweight housekeeping we need to do here. We need to square some accounts. I need to speak to something that's happened over the last couple of days on this program. And I take no pleasure in this being your first encounter with what I think is otherwise a delightful podcast. But when things happen in public, they need to be addressed in public. And so I'll speak straight to the matter. On this program, we pick a book of the Bible. We work straight through it a little bit each day until we're done. Right now we're working on the book of Galatians. It's a strongly worded letter written by the Apostle Paul to a group of churches he founded, churches which were imperiled when outsiders from Jerusalem came to their largely Gentile churches and disrupted their faith in Jesus by telling these new Gentile Christians they would have to honor and embrace the entirety of Moses' law, the Old Testament law, and effectively become Jewish in order to then follow Jesus and become Christians. Paul found out about this false gospel and wrote to the Galatian churches, stressing to them that there is no life through that course of action at all, that one does not earn right standing before God through adherence to the law, that the law was rather an effective tool meant to tutor humanity, meant to point out humanity's sin and need for God and to point out the character of God, but it was never designed as a means of salvation. Christ, however, and his work on the cross are the only means of gaining right standing with God of salvation. And Paul emphasizes that in the same way that Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, so it is for all people. Today, so it is for all the Galatian believers. So Paul is speaking to a dichotomy through this letter, making it very clear that the way to right standing with God proposed by these interlopers, these outsiders, these Judaizers, these legalizers, is no way to God at all. No one can keep the law well enough to earn right standing with God, even if it were the point of the law, but it's not. Rather, it is by faith, through the work of Christ, that one is saved, that one is made right with God. None of this is the problem that I'm speaking to. Rather, the issue that needs to be addressed is something that happened over the last two episodes as we made our way into Galatians chapter five, where Paul writes about a sensitive subject. I'll read starting in Galatians five, one. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. That's not the controversial part. That's beautiful. He goes on. Mark my words, I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. That's the sensitive part. Circumcision. It's a touchy topic. I know that. It's a physical sign of the covenant between God and Abraham that dates back all the way to the earliest pages of the Old Testament. It was a physical marker of those who were ethnically a part of the Jewish family, the people of God, throughout the centuries, throughout the Old Testament, and up to the time of Jesus and Paul here in the New Testament. Apparently, these agitators, these Judaizers, had come into this largely Gentile, uncircumcised Christian community here in Galatia, and had told them your adult men are going to have to be circumcised in order to but effectively become Jewish so that they can then become real followers of Jesus and real Christians. Paul is making it clear that you can pick only one of two ways. And if you get circumcised, you're picking the circumcision way, the law way, and the law was never designed to save or give you right standing with God in the first place. It's a fool's errand. To choose this is to reject faith in Christ, to reject the grace of Christ. It's a stern warning here. Don't choose this, Galatian Christians. Choose faith in Christ instead. Now I knew this was a touchy topic, a topic where there would be a lot of opportunities for immaturity and jesting, and that just simply is not what we do on this program. Over years of spending time together, we've built a certain degree of trust where you know that you don't come here for joking around and petty juvenile jokes, cheap cultural references, allusions to bodily functions. That stuff's for babies and never, ever funny. I feel I delivered two days of absolutely buttoned down, sincere, humorless treatment of this subject matter. As is always the case when I finished recording the episode, I sent the raw audio off to my friend Jeff Foote, who edits, publishes, and composes all the music for this podcast. I assumed he would understand the gravity of the subject matter and would match my tone and demeanor in his editing and musical decisions. You can then imagine my horror when I came in this morning and played back those two episodes, only to discover that at the end of the first of the two episodes, he composed and inserted a rollicking jazzy cover of Bobby Darren's 1959 hit Mac the Knife. And in the second of those two episodes, he composed and inserted a soaring anthemic rendition of Canadian rocker Brian Adams' 1983 hit Cuts Like a Knife. I can't imagine the pain, embarrassment, or discomfort this caused for so many of you, and you can be assured that Jeff and I will be having a conversation about how this kind of subject matter isn't meant for joking around. Okay. Tonal change. I feel better. That's off my chest. We've spoken to it. Now we need to regroup and direct our attention back to the word of God, which never has to depend on cheap puns about circumcision to make its point. Picking it up where we left off. Galatians 5, 7. You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth? Who cut in on you? Okay, I actually knew that was coming. Jeff, I want to just high five you. I take back everything I said. There's your high five. Jeff Foote, ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Jeffrey because he understood the tone of the passage. This is a funny passage. It's supposed to be funny. And a little Mac the knife cuts like a knife humor actually makes sense and is keeping with the spirit of what Paul is doing in this passage. He's mocking the idea. Paul is mocking the idea that circumcision is like one of two ways to right standing with God.
SPEAKER_01I mean, one way to right standing with God would be by putting your trust in Emmanuel, God with us, God in the flesh, the Son of God who went to the cross and is the perfect sacrifice for our sins for all time and is the promised king from the days of yor, who will come and reign on David's throne forever. That'd be one way would be faith in him. The other would be to cut some skin off the end of your penis.
SPEAKER_02I mean, they're both really good. Which one should we go with? The further we get into this passage, which is Galatians 5, 1 through 12, the more sardonic Paul is going to become. And we're really starting to get that here with the who cut in on you, pun. Now, in fairness, Paul uses race metaphors oftentimes, and who cut in on you in your race? I mean, that's one level of the metaphor that he's using here. But also, he didn't have to say cut in on you. And just in case you're sitting here thinking, like, I don't know, maybe you're reading into that one a little bit. Just stick with me for a couple days, because when we get to the end of this passage, yeah, he's gonna fire the shot. You're gonna hear the whole thing. I mean, it's the most shocking verse in the whole book of Galatians. It's one of the most shocking verses in the New Testament, the whole Bible. Paul is not messing around here, and he absolutely is needling, is jabbing at the laughable idea that circumcision is one path to right standing with God, and all the stuff I said about Jesus is, you know, that's another. Like they're kind of, you know, they're just sort of hand in hand. I, for one, love that we get this version of Paul from time to time. The version where he goes no holds barred and takes a laughable, terrible idea that needs to be mocked and just rips into it with absolute directness. And again, this Galatians 5.7 is just the tip of the iceberg. He's going to hit this point much, much harder here in just a couple of verses. So as we read this passage, as we look back on the stuff we've already looked at in Galatians 5, as we look forward to what he still has to say about it, we gotta understand two things. He's making this theological point that you gotta go all in on one or all in on the other. He's taking us to the logical conclusion that if you're gonna go all in on Jesus, that means it's Jesus plus nothing. But if you're gonna go all in on circumcision, well, what does it really look like to go all in on circumcision? If some circumcision shows that you're pretty committed, might there be something more you could do to demonstrate that you're really committed? And we'll let him round out that line of thinking for us tomorrow and the next day. Thanks for being a good sport and having a laugh about things. Also, sometimes having a laugh about things is how the Bible illustrates really important true things that actually are very serious, but can be illustrated with a little bit of Bible humor, which from time to time we get, and I always enjoy it when we do. I think that's plenty for now. I don't know what Jeff's gonna do musically. He's probably worn out. He's been making a lot of music, but I just again applause for Jeffrey for understanding the text and making this program far better than it would be without him. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon, but I'm not sure what I'm saying.