I'm gonna take your temperature and I'm gonna find out how well you know me and see if you've been paying attention. That's right. This is a straight up relational quiz that only has one question. I'm going to put this in front of you. I think probably I've spoken to this before on the podcast, but maybe not. I think you could probably triangulate to this answer anyway. All right. That's all my setup. Here we go. Here's the trivia question about me. What was my favorite movie from the time I was 18 years old until, I don't know, for most of my life? What was my favorite movie? A movie that is still near and dear to my heart. How many of you said braveheart? Because it was braveheart. It was totally braveheart. And that virtue, that central, I mean, what word do you associate with braveheart if you've seen it? It's freedom, right? That was a very powerful notion for me. I grew up on after-school cartoons where fighting for freedom was always the right thing to do when America stood for freedom. And I understand that that's turned weird since then. I understand that we've spent a little time in a post-truth world where beautiful, inarguably beautiful virtues come in and out of fashion. Things like compassion and empathy and freedom are virtues that we actually debate, depending on what side of the political aisle we tend to gravitate toward. What in the world? All of those things are good, by the way, just as a footnote. But I loved the way that movie screamed freedom. I mean, it was almost anachronistic how much it hit that. Why am I saying almost? It was anachronistic and how much it was hitting those American constitutional notions of libertarian freedom in a an early 13th century Scottish setting. I don't care if it's anachronistic. I liked it, dang it, and those bagpipes. Man, those Yulian pipes that they play throughout that show. I think James Horner did the music for Braveheart. Just magnificent. No, for me as a kid, and even still, there's no debate, freedom is a virtue. Freedom is inherently good. Slavery is inherently bad. Given the option to pick between the two without any nuancing or anything, as a state of being, we'd want freedom. That's the better option. And likewise, Paul's audience, the people he's writing to in the book of Galatians, there was no ambiguity about whether freedom was fashionable or unfashionable. Freedom wasn't something that you would have had to have nuanced for these people to be like, well, like, mm-hmm. What kind of freedom are we talking about? No, Paul is assuming with this letter, and the original audience is assuming in how they read it, that freedom is just good and we know this and we accept it. Is there room to nuance what we mean by freedom? Yes, and in fact we're going to do that today. But so many of the things that we debate and we talk about in the Bible where little debates come up, you know, we get into it over this thing or that thing. Tonally, when you actually read that part of the Bible, there's no ambiguity at all. The author of that particular text is like, this is great! Here is a great thing that is inarguably great, and everyone with half a brain should be celebrating this. And so I try to read texts like that, at least on my first pass, with the I try to receive it with the tone that it's being written. And we talked yesterday how we are into the triumphal moment of this as we get to Galatians 5.1. I mean, let's just stick with the movie we're talking about here. You got you get the brave heart pipes echoing through the highlands. You finally get the big grand sweeping theme. As you get to Galatians 5.1, here's the payoff. Finally realized it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and don't let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. There's so much that we're going to unpack as we work through chapter 5, but let's just linger on that word freedom, given what we've already seen in the Bible, and maybe we'll cheat and go to a couple other passages here as well. Freedom for what? Freedom from what? Freedom to what? What specifically do we mean here when we say freedom in this context? Well, I think first and most obviously, we're talking about freedom from the law. Now, but that's we're talking about the first one on the list here. And people will panic over that and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Some of the stuff in the old like we don't just throw out the old testament. Well, no, clearly we don't. I mean, what happened in the previous passage? Paul put a value on the Old Testament by referencing a story from Genesis 16 to 21. He's directly quoting Scripture one page earlier. He's in Deuteronomy and Habakkuk and Leviticus. How much time have we spent on this stuff? No, clearly the message of Galatians is not wad up the Old Testament and throw it out. Clearly, the message of Jesus is not wad up the Old Testament and throw it out. I mean, he's five or six sentences into his public ministry in the book of Matthew, when he says, I didn't come to abolish the law and the prophets. I came to fulfill them. So very clearly, the New Testament is not saying there shouldn't be an Old Testament. Let's get rid of that and wash our hands of it. But also very clearly, there was ambiguity in the early church about what you do with it. Is it still binding? Is the law a pathway to God? Well, people at that time believed that through the law you could be justified before God. What is Paul going through and saying in Galatians? He's saying that conventional wisdom that has been present for some time has been wrong all along, and I, Paul, was wrong for buying into that, thinking it, advocating for it, even shedding blood over that faulty assumption that right standing with God could be earned through the law. It can't be. All salvation, all right standing with God ever, Paul argues, is through faith, just like Abraham, the man of faith. There never was a moment before or after the law or ever, where some degree of really excellent adherence to that would exclude someone from being under the curse of the law, because again, here's another Old Testament reference, just one page earlier. The law itself said, cursed is everyone who doesn't keep every law in this book, who doesn't do everything this book says. So when Paul is making the argument, you know, by saying it's for freedom that Christ has set us free, and somebody's like, Well, what freedom are we talking about? When Paul's making the argument that, well, part of it is that we have freedom from the law. He's not saying we have freedom to wad up the entire Old Testament and throw it away. It reveals the character of God. It reveals human sin, it reveals human need. The law isn't a competitor or an alternative to Jesus. These are completely different categories of things. The law is pointing us toward Jesus. But freedom from the law here means that that as the point of contact between us and God, that as the thing we participate in, via, say, clean and unclean rules and the sacrificial system, to gain enough temporary right standing before God to participate in the religious life of the community through killing animals and doing observing all the things you're supposed to observe. That's a heavy burden, and now you are freed from that burden in Christ. That is not your pathway to right standing from God. The law has done what it was supposed to do, and that burden is gone. Now, some of you are probably thinking to yourself, Well, that sounds like a bunch of horse pucky there, because if that's the deal, if the weight of the law is no longer on us, what's to keep us from just doing a bunch of crazy stuff? And a bunch of the naughties, all the naughties, and just being like, Oh, I'm forgiven, it's okay, I have Jesus. Well, Paul is going to speak to that as we move forward in Galatians. He's going to speak to that in other parts of the New Testament as well. So he's well aware that people might run in that direction and he's going to speak to it. For now, what is this freedom that Christ has set us free? What is this freedom about? One, it's freedom from the law. Along with that, we're freed from sin because in Christ there is the actual forgiveness of sin. There's the actual resolution to the problem of sin, because instead of imperfect sacrifices like we get in the Old Testament that somehow symbolize staying the hand of God to stay in a place where you're participating in the community religious life, instead, you're talking about Christ, who is the perfect sacrifice for all sin forever. There is no need to have a sacrificial system after Jesus. Why would you do it? It's an inferior sacrifice when a superior sacrifice, a perfect sacrifice, has already been made. It's nonsense. The sin of humanity, the sin of those who are in Christ is dealt with. The price has been paid for that. The atoning sacrifice has been made through Christ. Therefore, you're free from the law, but you're also free from sin. The guilt and the burden, not just of the existence of the law, but of violating the will of God, breaking the law of God, sin trespass, that's resolved. That debt has been paid as far as the East is from the West. That's pretty good freedom. So we're free from the law, we're free from the curse of the law, we're free from sin. And that's exactly half of my list that I brainstormed here about what this freedom means and this freedom that is inarguably good and what exactly the extent of this freedom is. So we're gonna do the other half of the list tomorrow, and we're gonna do it in the same exact spirit that Paul is writing this, and then we did it today, the assumption that freedom in this context is inarguably good, and slavery is inarguably bad, and if by the work of God you have been liberated from slavery and moved from a state of slavery to a state of freedom, it would be the height of dumb to go back to the state of slavery. So you wouldn't want to do that, and anyone who would do that, the apostle Paul would say he is perplexed about them. More about what freedom means in this context next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.