Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And there are two things that I think I'm always, I hope I'm always trying to communicate with this. I hope the the whole podcast, the way the whole thing is built, communicates these two things. Number one, the Bible wants to be understood. Why would God even make it if he didn't want you to know him? Why would the Bible even exist if it were just there to intimidate you and make you feel bad and confuse you and make you feel hopeless? Like I know this is probably important or whatever, but I don't understand what a single dang word on the page means. That doesn't make any sense. The Bible wants to be understood by its nature. And the second thing that hopefully I'm driving home a lot is you can do that. You can interpret things well. You're really good at it. You practice interpreting things all the time. You're no sucker. You know how to see through advertisements and political slogans. You can read people, you can read social signals. You're great at interpreting stuff. So a lot of what we do here is just take the skills that you're building all the time when you read books or watch shows or have conversations or navigate social things or just the world in general. We're just trying to take that skill set and constantly likewise it to stuff in the Bible to drill more and more this idea that you have the talent needed to read this document and understand it. Meaning that I'm not even a worthy middleman. Like we're really just doing this together. You can understand the Bible. Okay, that's a lot of self-indulgent talking about myself and ourselves and what we're doing here, but there's a reason that I'm driving at this. There's a third thing that I think is true about the Bible. One, it wants to be understood. Two, you can understand it. But three, if we're to be honest, some passages are a little bit harder than other passages. For example, I think it's pretty easy to pop open the Bible and come upon a story where somebody's like, you should love your neighbor as yourself. And somebody else is like, well, who's my neighbor? And then the first guy tells a story, and the story is about somebody who gets beaten and shoved into a ditch and left for dead, and nobody's really interested in helping them, and then somebody comes along, even though they're an undesirable outsider, and they do the right thing and they help the person in the ditch who's in a helpless situation. You're like, oh, okay, yeah, I think I get it. Or you come across a story where there's a shepherd and he's got some sheep and the bunch of them are there, but one of them gets away and he goes to look for the one that got away. Like, oh, okay, I I think I get that one too. There you read through the Old Testament and you come upon a command of God, and it's like thou shalt not kill. You're like, oh, well, I might have some questions, I suppose, about war or self-defense, but I think I get the gist of this one. Then there are other passages like the entire book of Galatians that are a little bit more difficult, and maybe we're getting into one of the most difficult parts of that right here. We've just finished up with the emotional aside section that comes right in the middle of the book of Galatians. The first half of Galatians is very passionate, lots of personal stories from Paul about his experiences and his resume and how he feels about the Galatian church and the gospel. And then we get to the middle of chapter four, and there's sort of this selah, this little breather that we get right there, where Paul is like, I'm pleading with you here. Like, come on, think about these guys who've shown up. How are they acting? What do they want? What are they about? Now think about our history. Look at them, look at me, now look at them, now look at me, now look at them, now look at me. Do you see the difference? Come on. It's a personal appeal. It's very emotional. I wish I could be there with you right now and change my tone. I'm perplexed by you. It's so personal. But then we get done with that little interlude in Galatians 4.20, and we get back into the argumentation, the flow of logic. And I'm gonna level with you. This next part from Galatians 4.21 through the end of chapter 4, it's 10 verses, is one of the more challenging flow of logic kind of things that we get from Paul, in my opinion, anywhere in the whole Bible. It is understandable. I think I see what he's doing, but I also think it's okay for me to just admit that I bet this would have hit a lot harder for the original audience than it does for you and me, because Paul seems to be employing an allegory or even crafting an allegory from the Old Testament to sort of sum up all of the arguments that he's made so far about this ongoing issue in Galatia. And of course, if you've been with me, you know what it is, but I'll reset it real quick anyway. The issue was that Jewish Christians had come up here to Turkey, Asia Minor, and they'd convinced all of these largely Gentile Christians that in order to be made right with God, they needed to have faith in Jesus plus adhere to the Mosaic law. And now Paul is coming back and writing this letter and saying, No, in order to have right standing with God, you need to have faith in Jesus plus nothing. That's it. That's a pretty big distinction between the two. So Paul's laid out his arguments and we have a pretty good sense of why he's saying what he's saying. Now he's made his emotional appeal. Now he's gonna try to drive this thing home with an allegory that again I think probably hit harder for the original audience than it does for you and me, and we're gonna have to work hard to put ourselves in the shoes of that original audience to have it have any kind of impact on us like it did for them. Here we go. Galatians 4 21. Don't be discouraged if this doesn't immediately make sense to you. It's okay. Here we go. Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? For it's written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman, and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise. Now these things can be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves. This is Hagar. Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother, for it's written, Be glad, O barren woman who bears no children, break forth and cry aloud, you who have no labor pains, because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband. Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. At that time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It's the same way now. But what does the Scripture say? Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son. Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman. Okay, look, if you just got that on your first try and you're going, Oh obviously. Wow, how could I have read that story in the Old Testament and not immediately have known that that's what it was going to end up meaning later in the Bible? Then you are a filthy, dirty liar. Or you're just very, very, very smart and not particularly humble. Dang, how did you catch that? No, I think probably pretty much everybody, the rest, like all I think we're all in a spot here where we're going, gimme a minute. I'm not totally sure I'm seeing all the comparisons. However, I spend some time with this passage and I've been mapping it out. Obviously, this is a comparison between two things from a story in the Old Testament that we're going to talk about tomorrow. And so everything in this difficult section is going to be symmetrical. Everything that exists in column A is going to have a counterpart in column B. Everything from the story of each of these two women, the Hagar column and the Sarah column, are going to correspond to each other as well. Does he even say Sarah's name in here? I don't think he does. Oh, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that before. Final thought before we dive into this more tomorrow. I don't know that this story that comes from back in the early going of Genesis, around Genesis chapter, what is it? It's in the twenties. So we'll find it tomorrow. I don't know that this story from Genesis actually does mean what Paul is writing right here. I'm not sure the whole story was providentially crafted by God back in the Old Testament, so that one day, when Paul wrote this letter to the Galatian Church, we would then understand the true meaning of it. It might be that. It also might not be that. I I can't quite tell. Maybe I'll have a stronger opinion after we work it through for a few days. But there is stuff in the Old Testament that I look at it and go, well, obviously that is typographical. That is theologically pointing to something else. And I don't just mean smoking gun prophecies where it's like, but you, Bethlehem and the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah, for out of you will come a ruler, will be the shepherd of Israel from Micah 5. I mean, that's obvious. Clearly, it's a prophecy that points to Jesus. To read the relationship between the Old Testament passage in Micah and the passage in Matthew any other way would just be a bad read. They they're necessarily connected. There's stuff like the Passover in Exodus, where, you know, they the way to make the angel of death pass over your place is you kill a lamb and you take its blood and you put it on the top of the door and on the sides of the door, and the blood drips down. It's it's a cross and it's the blood of the lamb, and it's the judgment of God passing over because the blood of the lamb is upon you and your household. I mean, come on. It's so thick and so obvious. My point is, I'm not sure that this Hagar and Sarah and the sons born out of each of their situations, example that Paul's using here in Galatians 4 is going to turn out to be so obvious, so smoking gun, as I like to say. And I'm not at all threatened by it being either way. I think it's perfectly fine for Paul to just grab a story everybody would know, and likewise the thing. Obviously, I'm not above that. And what would be the source material that everybody in the room would have been most likely to be familiar with in terms of the stories you could tap into? Well, I mean the Bible stuff. So maybe there's room when we work through some of these New Testament passages to say some stuff from the Old Testament that points to the New Testament is clearly deeply theologically connected and inseparable, and it was ordained that way from the beginning. Maybe there are other things where, in the same way, a pastor might give a rather lightweight sermon on David and Goliath and be like, what are the Goliaths in your life? Well, you know, maybe it's smoking, or maybe it's laziness, or maybe it's that diet soda, you need to quit drinking. Well, God gave David the power to beat that Goliath, and you know, pray to God for the power to defeat you. I mean, that's just a terrible sermon. I'm kind of insulting Paul by even intoning that this sinks to that level. I don't think it's like that at all. But maybe there's room for some connections between the Old and the New Testament to be smoking gun and inseparable, and some other connections between the Old and New Testament to be a New Testament author drawing on an idea or a story. I'm gonna leave that open-ended for the time being to help set us up for a fair exploration of this challenging passage to understand, which we will do more of tomorrow. All right, good times. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.