Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and today we're looking at a passage that reminds us that some of the values of the deeply distant Old Testament times are a little bit foreign to us. Things worked different. We're going to look at a passage today that predates the Old Testament law. We don't even have this stuff from Moses at the point that we're going to go back and look at here. So it's really interesting when you get to things before Moses, because you kind of got to run the mental calculus of how did the characters know what to do? Sometimes God spelled it out for them, other times not. And the super distant ancient Near Eastern world was well very, very, very different from us, and frankly, very different from even the Roman world of the New Testament. I mean, we're talking real, real old here, where we're going to go and look at, we're talking like 2,000, 2200-ish BC. So a total of 30, what are we at? 22, 42. Are we, man, like 4,000 plus years before right now? How often do we even get to engage with anything that's 4,000 years old as we go through life day to day? It's crazy. Here's what we're doing. We're in Galatians chapter 4. Paul is making the argument that right standing with God is a result of faith in Jesus plus nothing. He's well into developing this argument. He's just finished making an emotional plea for the people in this church to listen to him and believe that right standing with God is a result of faith in Jesus plus nothing. And to round out all the points he's made so far, he's tapping into a story from the deepest parts of the Old Testament about Abraham and his family. There were two women by which Abraham had kids, and it was a very complicated story. And I think Paul is assuming here in Galatians chapter 4, as he uses this story as an example to drive home his point. He's assuming that the original audience knew the story. And so it makes sense if we want to understand what's going on, we're going to have to follow suit. So I'm going to turn this many pages. It's all of them. I'm just letting you know it's basically all the pages of all the Bible. And I'm going clear back here to I don't know. I'm just going to thumb through it and we're going to see what we get. I'm going back to Genesis chapter 11. Oh, wow. Okay. I'm going bold here. Genesis chapter 11 has the story of the Tower of Babel. That's how far back we are. Everybody's got the same language. They're building a great big city, a great big tower of some sort. And then God sees their hubris and using like internal conversation language is kind of like a hint at the Trinity here. He decides, God decides, three and one. He's going to come down, he's going to bust that up. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other, God says. So the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. And then we get a great big genealogy through chapter 11. A lot of time passes, and we get all the way down to a guy named Terah, T-E-R-A-H. He turns out to be the father of Abram. Eventually his name becomes Abraham. Now this is relevant because clear back forward in Galatians chapter 4, the story that Paul is giving us is once again about Abraham. Paul writes in Galatians 4.21 Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman, and the other by the free woman. All right, so now let's flip clear back here to Genesis 12 and see how we get to that part in the story. Genesis 12 1, it says the Lord had said to Abram, this is the first time Abram is even on screen. The Lord had said to Abram, Leave your country, your people, and your father's household, and go to a land I'll show you. And then he makes Abram a promise. God says, I'll make you into a great nation and I'll bless you. I'll make your name great, and you'll be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you. We've discussed it in this season, we've discussed it in every season. This is one of the most important parts of the whole Bible. It sets the whole plot in motion. This is just a gigantic moment in the unfolding of the whole redemptive story of the whole Bible, but that's not exactly what we're tackling now. So you get the gist there. So Abraham does it, and he goes and he starts traveling. He took his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot, the story with how things work out with Lot gets pretty dramatic, and all the possessions they'd accumulated, and all the people they'd acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. Eventually, Canaan is gonna be conquered by distant descendants of Abraham, and that's gonna turn out to be the promised land that God just promised Abraham a couple of verses earlier here. But Abraham, I'm just gonna call him Abraham from here on out, but his name isn't quite Abraham yet. It's still going by Abraham at this point. Abraham is nomadic. He lives in a time where that was a common lifestyle for even a very wealthy person. You've got this traveling caravan that goes around and uses different locations seasonally based on, you know, the water, the weather, when things are in bloom, when it would work to graze flocks in a certain place, when other nomads are in a certain place at a given time. And so he's living this lifestyle. It's gonna seem to you and me, like modern readers, like this guy is homeless and he's poor and he's miserable. But to the original audience who knew Abram at the time, or people like Abram, or people reading Genesis when it first came out, they're gonna be like, oh, dude, this dude's, yeah, he's doing really, frankly, pretty well. This is a wealthy man of great influence. And along the way, we see that Abraham has to work out where to maybe start to settle down a little bit with other people and his family. And then in Genesis chapter 15, we see that covenant, that deal that God made with Abraham. They ratify it through a ceremony, and this covenant that's being ratified is one that includes the promise of descendants. But a lot of time is passing, and even as Abraham, in this old ceremonial fashion, is walking between a bunch of disemboweled animals that were spread on either side of the aisle. Like I'm not kidding, that's how they ratified a covenant back then. Even as he's doing that with God, he's gotta be wondering a little bit, like, okay, I'm supposed to have all these descendants, and none of this really works without them, but I am aging, and so is my wife. But, you know, all right, I believe you. And it says in verse six of Genesis 15, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. He's still going at Abram at this point, but you get the point. But now, no pun intended or maybe a little pun intended, we get to Genesis 16, and the question of gotta have kids is becoming pregnant. Now, Sarai, who's gonna go by Sarah later, Abram's wife had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar. So she said to Abram, The Lord has kept me from having children. Go sleep with my maidservant, perhaps I can build a family through her. Yikes, maybe not quite as shocking a super ancient world practice as it rightly sounds like it would be to you and me. Remember, there isn't a law yet, there isn't a people yet. I don't know, but maybe this is just what people did back then when they ran into this kind of problem. Like, I have to have an heir. You can create a dynastic crisis, and really Abraham is kind of a traveling king at this point. It's not a huge kingdom, but he's an important man, and a lot of people are counting on him. And so there's probably a lot of pressure at this point to be like, yeah, can we clarify this question of what happens someday when you're gone? And so Sarai brings her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham and is like, all right, let's make this happen. And he does the deed, and then she becomes pregnant, and unsurprisingly, pretty much immediately, Sarah begins to despise Hagar. Well, of course, I get the problem Sarai was trying to solve, but also we're talking about humans here, and this is going to be difficult. Well, this tension between Sarai, again, it goes by Sarah later, and Hagar spirals and intensifies. And eventually Hagar tries to run away, but then, I mean, of all things, God sees her and sends an angel to her, and he's like, I know who you are, I know you by name, you need to go back. And the promise to her is that in some weird way I'm going to bless your descendants, and they're going to be numerous as well. And so there's kind of another covenant here in a way, I guess, that says, You're now a child, and you'll have a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery, and he'll be a wild donkey of a man, his hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand will be against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers. We could unpack that endlessly. Like, why would you make even a promise like that? How's that good? But somehow she finds comfort in it, and she goes back and she bears Abraham a son, and Abraham's eighty-six years old when Ishmael is born. After that, uh Lot has got himself in trouble. We sort through the whole Sodom and Gomorrah issue, while still the question of Abraham and his family and his descendants is still in jeopardy. He has one named Ishmael, but it doesn't seem like that totally satisfies what God's promise was. I don't know. Then in chapter 20, Abraham does something that he's done at least twice, which is where he passes off his wife as his sister to try to curry favor with another powerful man. And so this guy named Abimelech takes Sarah into his harem, but then immediately God punishes everybody. Nobody in Abimelech's household can have kids anymore. And then Abimelech figures it out. He's like, uh, take your wife back. What are you doing, bro? And Abraham's like, okay. And Abraham prays to God, and then God heals Abimelech of his afflictions, and all of the people in Abimelech's, you know, under his care, they can all have kids again. For the Lord had closed up every womb in Abimelech's household because of Abraham's wife Sarah. So you see, this theme just keeps coming up about Sarah and kids, and Hagar and Abraham and the descendants of Abraham. I mean, it's it's a big saga, and to have any story go on this long in the Bible is pretty unique. Chapter 21. Finally, Sarah becomes pregnant, and it's Abraham's son, and the son ends up being named Isaac, and Isaac is the one who's going to end up carrying forward the promise. All the descendants of Abraham, the genealogy, all the way down to Jesus, they're all through the line of Isaac. And then to make a long story very, very short, there is tension between the descendants of Hagar and the descendants of Sarah. Indeed, some people look at that and they're like, well, one of those families turned out to be Islam, one of those families turned out to be Judaism. That's a much longer conversation in terms of what we do with it. But you could make the argument, or some would make the argument, that indeed that tension wasn't just realized in the time that Paul was writing Galatians chapter 4, but that tension goes all the way to today. Again, much bigger conversation, not going to try to unpack that one right now. There we go. We're more or less up to speed and refreshed on what it is that Paul is talking about in this passage. Now, next time around, we can try to connect the dots as to how Paul is likewising the broad strokes of that story. We just did a lightning run through to the situation he's speaking to with the Galatian church here in Galatians chapter 4. Was that a lot? I felt like that was a lot. Maybe it wasn't perfect, but we are better positioned than we were, whatever it is, 10, 12, 15 minutes ago. All right, we'll see if we can pay this thing off next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.