Hello, my name is Matt Whitman, and you're listening to the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. This is an audio-only program where we pick a book of the Bible and go through it a little bit each day until we're done, which means that when we pick a book of the Bible, whatever happens next in that book of the Bible is just whatever happens next. And that also means that because the Bible can at times be a pretty gritty book that deals with some very real things, that we might happen upon certain stuff that maybe you don't want your youngsters to listen to. This, therefore, is an overly tight, awkward disclaimer that is meant to stall to buy you time to listen to this program, this episode first, should you want to, before listening to it with the kids, because we're going to be talking about three, two, one. You still have time to turn it off. Half, quarter. Circumcision. We're going to be talking about circumcision. Circumcision comes up a lot in this passage. And understandably, it's a pretty touchy topic for the reason that you would expect, because of what circumcision is. I don't know if you had eighth grade health or if they cover this in there, but it's where they they cut the skin right off the penis, right there. And then usually they do it to little babies, right? And the baby doesn't know. It's just a baby. I hardly understand how the world is. It's probably like, hey, maybe every eight days for the rest of my life, you just get circumcised again. They don't know. They have no idea. They forget it. They're like a goldfish, probably. I don't know. I don't remember being a baby. But adult circumcision, that's a different deal. I think the adults remember when they get circumcised, probably primarily because of the agonizing pain that I imagine comes from chopping on that part of their body. So you got the obvious reason that circumcision is a touchy subject, but then you also have a less obvious reason that we're going to talk about more as we go along here, and that is what it had meant in recent decades and centuries to the people involved in this conversation here in the book of Galatians. So, with all that said, there's my disclaimer, there's my setup. We're talking about circumcision for the next few days. It's kind of low-hanging fruit here to just go in and cut it up with these hilarious little circumcision jokes, many of which I'm sure I could think of if I absolutely wanted to. But we're adults and we're going to handle this with dignity, and we're on a bit of a schedule here, and I don't even want to take one little slice out of the amount of time that we have. So, Jeff, if you catch anything that even sounds like some sort of cheap, lazy, uninspired circumcision joke while we're covering this stuff that would be off-brand and off-color and out of place. Just go ahead and slice that out in post. Okay, Paul writes the following Galatians 5, 1. 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. We spent the last few days on this verse. It's a beautiful verse. We're going to keep coming back to it. It's kind of the theme for the home stretch of the book of Galatians. Now is the part where we get into the circumcision stuff. Mark my words. I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again, I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he's obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ. You've fallen away from grace, but by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. Okay. If I am attending church in Galatians and they're having their circumcision revival meetings where the Judaizers will come up from Jerusalem, Paul's not there, none of Paul's buddies are there, and the agitators show up and they're like, hey, we're gonna have a special service. And they get to the end of the service and they're playing just as I am, and every head's bowed, and every eye's closed, and they're like, All right, if you feel the Lord's calling on your life to get circumcised to come up front and do that right now, just raise your hand right there where you're sitting. Every eye closed. Yes, I see that hand. Come on up. And you go up there, and now you're down, you're in your your whitey tidies, or your boxers, or your loincloth, or whatever they wore back then. You just kind of stand in line, it's kind of cold. You can sort of hear the metal clinking around up there, and other guys are in line. You're trying not to make eye contact, but you're like, I I guess we're supposed to do this is a pretty good sermon. I mean, I wanna I wanna be a Christian, and that guy he said we're supposed to, and he has a super fancy hat. I don't think you can get those hats unless you're right about things. This doesn't feel great. I think it's gonna hurt a lot. I'm not super excited about this, but you know, okay. Like if you're that guy and you're either literally in that position or you metaphorically you're wrestling with this question, you're metaphorically in that position, and you get to this line, for in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value, I think that's gonna raise some red flags. Like, well, whoa, wait a minute. So it doesn't do anything for me, one way or the other. So we could just leave everything alone, no cutting, no awkwardness, and I would still be just as much a Christian. Like that would be a very exciting and interesting line to me. Well, we've talked about one aspect of why this was a big deal and like why people would be timid about it, because obviously this isn't gonna probably feel real good, and I don't know, I'd imagine it'd be kind of humiliating to have everybody know that you just did that last week. Like, hey, you look pretty tender there, Terry. You doing okay? Well, I mean, I think we all know why I'm not feeling so good this week. Oh, is that a case? Fake almost punch. Come on, dude. Don't seriously, like, you can't even fake it. Like I clinched all up and it actually hurt. Okay, I might do it one more time. Seriously, stop it! I mean, socially it's gonna be awkward. It's not gonna be the most fun thing ever. That's one of the reasons that this is a big deal. But the other reason is because this was a boundary marker of Judaism. It was a boundary marker for the people who followed the one true God, and it was part of this really unique identity of the Jewish people, going back all the way forever, I mean, thousands of years at this point. The sign of God's relationship with his chosen people of all things, and I'm not God, I've heard real smart people work up theories about why it had to be circumcision. I'm not sold on any of those theories. Right now, my working theory for why God chose circumcision as the sign of his covenant is because that's what he picked. I don't know. I didn't I didn't write it out of that's just what he went with. It's certainly very intimate, you gotta give it that. But whatever you make of that sign, that is what God commanded, and that is what all the Israelite men had done forever. It was expected, it was a mark of you are a people set aside, a unique and holy people who are supposed to be dedicated to the Lord for the glory of the Lord in this world through the covenants that he's made with you. And th stuff struck at that identity as the world changed coming out of the end of the Old Testament. Now, you'll recall the Old Testament ends with the Persian era, and even during the era of captivity before that, in when the Babylonians were in charge, and then when the Persians were in charge in the 500s and four hundreds B.C., you can tell it was pretty difficult for some of these young men, like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Ezekiel, to participate in these foreign cultures, particularly Babylon, because they had different expectations about what's clean and not clean and what's pure and not pure and how to do dietary stuff. And it's not too tough to read between the lines and know that the circumcision thing probably set those early exiles apart in perhaps a bit of an awkward way. Circumcision, on the rare occasions where in polite society you would have observed that on a Jewish man. I don't know. How do you know? Well, they did know. From time to time, apparently they knew, and apparently it was very off-putting and shocking to people who weren't Jewish that this was the sign of the covenant. What an odd thing. Why would your people do that to themselves? Okay, whatever. I'm tempted at this point to super rushy finish line this, but I I want to flesh the whole thing out. I want to work through this idea completely and this story completely. I think that what's at the end of this conversation is something that causes us to feel a little more empathy for the agitators here, but also that you know causes us to feel even more certainly that Paul is right and they are wrong. So I want to take our time on it. I'm gonna pause right here and we'll just pick up where we left off next time around. But first, quickly on the way out the door, I noticed a handful of you signed up to support the thing on Patreon this week. That was wildly encouraging. Thank you for doing that. I have been so out of the loop on things. Like I I'm barely keeping my head above water with this book project and other things that I've been doing. You probably have noticed I'm not posting YouTube videos hardly at all. And for the first time in a year and a half, just in the last couple of days, I I can breathe and be a human again. And so I've been going back through and seeing some of the lovely comments that you've written on Patreon and other places. I've read a bunch of the reviews that you've written of late, and then I see a few of you signed up to support the thing. But I've been in a very good but very challenging time in my life. Like pretty much no other time. And sort of come out of this crazy season, catch my breath, and see all of that, which is very encouraging. And I want to say thank you. So there's my thank you. That felt like a big time tonal mismatch with the episode that we just did, but we're gonna live with it. All right, more on the circumcision stuff next time around. And thank you. Both can be true at once. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.