And then we have to my goodness. We were this close, I'm holding my fingers very close together, to discovering something brand new about the Bible that nobody had ever figured out. It was gonna be amazing. I mean, this close about this passage that we're talking about today from Galatians 4, 17 through 20, but it's not gonna happen because there is no connection here. And I actually discovered nothing, and it was a dead end. But man, it would have been cool. I'll tell you what that was here in just a minute. We're in the middle of this emotional aside here in the book of Galatians. It happens right in the middle of the book. Paul is in the midst of this surgical argumentation. Surgical, because if you don't know the book has a bunch of references to circumcision. That was an accident pun. But as is always the case when we accident our way into a pun in these conversations, we're keeping it. So it's having this surgical, the lawyer-like conversation, laying out all the arguments to the people of this church that he loves, that he has this great history with to try to help them reason their way back to the true gospel and the true message of Christ. But they got suckered by some Judaizers, some agitators who came in from out of town, presumably from down around Jerusalem, and they showed up and they're like, hey, you all need to obey the Old Testament law of Moses and the expanded stuff that our scribes have added along the way, or you're not really Christians and you don't really know God. So you're all going to need to get circumcised too. And of course, you know, they start unrolling the blades and the clinking sound happens, and it's all real shiny metal and stuff. And some of the guys are like, you know what? What can we just fire off a letter to Paul before we cut anything? That seems very permanent. Let's just verify. So somebody reached out to Paul, and this, you know, Paul's replying with this letter. It's a very surgical letter, once again, except for this part that we've been looking at for the last week here in Galatians 4, 12 through 20. This part's very emotional. This part is that Paul just laying his bleeding heart out there on the floor in front of him. He's being like, Do you remember all that we've been through? Do you remember the condition I was in when I first came to you and how you received me? I was hideous. I was broken. Then you treated me like it was a beautiful messenger from God Himself. And you showed care to me and my weakness, and I showed care to you and your weakness. And together we grew in the gospel, and something beautiful happened there. Where is all this joy gone? Where is all this clarity on the work of God gone for you guys? What happened? And now I'm to believe that you all are mad at me because I'm telling you the truth about what you received from God in the first place. That's the argument that He's made over the last few days that we've been looking at. But he goes on with this emotional argument here, starting in verse 17. I'm gonna read it. Those people, he's talking about the agitators who came and messed with the Galatians, those people are zealous to win you over, but for no good. What they want is to alienate you from us so that you may be zealous for them. It's fine to be zealous, provided the purpose is good and to be so always not just when I'm with you. But my dear children, for whom I'm again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone because I'm perplexed about you. Isn't that fun to read? I really like reading that one. I might do it a couple more times, just even though it's not really required, just because you can feel Paul in it from across 2,000 years of history. I can feel what's going on in this dude's life and his heart and his brain with how he wrote it. It's very easy to internalize it and inflect it myself. So you catch that word zealous, right? That's where I was thinking there might be some brilliant Bible breakthrough that we were going to discover together today. But again, there's not. There's not going to be that. Zealous. When you think about the stuff you remember from other parts of the Bible, what pops to mind? Where does where does that word pop up? It's okay if you can't think of anything, but maybe some of you can. If so, you know the ground rules of the podcast. If I ask you a question and you know the answer, regardless of social circumstances, it is incumbent upon you to shriek it at the top of your lungs out of context. So just go ahead and do that right now. Zealous. Where else does that word come up in the Bible? Here's where my brain went. I thought of one of Jesus' disciples, Simon the Zealot. He called someone who was not just zealous, but was a part of a group that were called the zealots. Now, the time of Jesus and Paul and the New Testament, there was huge political and social pressure going on in the Roman world and particularly the Roman Jewish world. You'll recall that way back the Babylonians came and destroyed the last of the Jewish kingdoms in 586 BC. They took them into captivity, but then Persia came along and toppled Babylon in 539, 538. Then the first king of Persia was Cyrus the Great, and he's like, You all can go back and rebuild Jerusalem, rebuild your temple. And Zerubbabel, the descendant of David, the ancestor of Jesus himself, was like, Yes, I will go do that. And he went and it was hard, but he rebuilt the temple in Ezra, and then in the book of Nehemiah, they rebuilt the walls and they shored the whole thing up, and then the Old Testament ends. Well, a little bit after that, Alexander the Great comes along and quote unquote liberates Jerusalem in the 330s B.C. bloodlessly, and topples Persia, and then he dies, and all of the world empire gets divided up amongst Alexander's generals. And a couple different generals own Jerusalem and Judea and the Jewish people as a subject people for a while. Eventually, in the middle of the 100s B.C., the Greek overlords of the Jews push it too far. They have a rebellion. This is what Hanukkah celebrates. The Maccabees family led it, and they set up their own kingdom. And now there's a Jewish independent free kingdom again for the first time since Nebuchadnezzar came to town in 586 B.C. But it's awful. It's corrupt, it's a disaster. It makes all the same mistakes that the northern kingdom of Israel made. It makes all the same mistakes that the worst kings in the southern kingdom of Judah made, and it suffers the same fate as Israel and Judah. A big giant empire comes along and takes it over. So a little bit before the assassination of Julius Caesar, I think in the 60s BC, I don't have it in front of me, Gnias Magnus Pompey shows up, the great Roman general, and the Jewish leaders, the Jewish kings, have been like, hey, come help us out. We're having a little bit of turmoil over here. And he's like, I will totally come help out, and I won't I definitely won't take over your kingdom. And then he gets there, he's like, hey, I'm gonna take over your kingdom, though. And they're like, please don't. And he's like, but I'm gonna. And then he did. And he even walked right into the Holy of Holies. And he didn't die. So I guess God didn't live in that temple? I don't know. That's kind of a Bible head scratcher right there. At any rate, about 20 years after that, Julius Caesar gets shanked by all of his buddies, and there's a big civil war, and in the end, Julius Caesar's godson, Octavian, emerges from all of that as the first emperor of the new Roman Empire. He goes by the title Caesar Augustus, and of course, eventually he calls for a series of censuses to get a feel for what he has in this new empire. And one of those is what moves Marian Joseph to Bethlehem, where Jesus is born. Boom, then we're into the New Testament. Ha ha, there we go. In the midst of all of that pressure and the Roman occupation that started under Pompey in the 60s BC, a whole bunch of different political responses to the Jewish occupation emerged in Jewish circles. There's the ones that you know about, like the Sadducees. They were willing to play along with Rome to play the political game and gain power. The Herodians, the people who liked the Herod family. They weren't even Jewish, but they got to be kings over the Jews. So some people tried to play nice with the Herods to curry political favor with them and with Rome. The Pharisees, they were more politically or religiously conservative, I should say, and they were willing to accept occupation for now because they knew there wasn't much they could do, that they were socially subversive. But that was about it. They wanted the ritual purity of the people so that maybe they could get another crack at having an independent kingdom. Then you had the people who are like, this is stupid. We're just getting everything wrong. We just need to go out in the desert and study the scriptures and live holy lives. These were the Essenes. These are the people who made the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Qumran settlement. And then you've got another group called the Zealots. And these are all outlined, by the way, by Josephus, the first century Jewish historian who we've referenced so many times over the course of this podcast. The Zealots were kind of terrorists and revolutionaries. I don't know, a terrorist might be too strong, right? Is it a freedom fighter or is it a terrorist? Whatever you want to call them, they were the ones who wanted to incite violence, were willing to even be violent toward appeasers or their fellow countrymen who wouldn't engage in violence, but they would accept no compromise. Nothing other than the violent overthrow of the Roman occupiers will do. So ultra, ultra hardcore wild cards in the midst of it, and Josephus was not a real big fan of them, in part because they're the people who incited the revolution that caused Titus and Vespasian to show up in the 60s and 70s A.D. and completely crush the Judean rebellion, culminating with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. So the first temple got destroyed in 586 B.C., a day of woe and heartache and calamity that would define an injury that would define the Jewish people for centuries, and then a second, perhaps even greater calamity when the second temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans. And weirdly enough, the zealots even took another run at it in the early 100s and got crushed again, and then Rome was having no more of it, and they just broke up all of the provinces of Judea, the Jewish provinces and everything. I mean, the Pharisees and Sadducees got entirely stripped of all of their power. Everything changed right after the New Testament, and it all changed because of what the Zealots did. So here's what I thought was going to happen, and why we were going to be the coolest people ever, and probably win awards, like maybe ribbons or badges or something. Get a write-up in some kind of like podcast monthly or something, but it's not going to happen because there was no connection. I thought there was a connection with this word zealous. Those people are zealous to win you over, but for no good. I thought, oh, well, Paul's tapping into that language. He's like, you know, these people are zealots, maybe, or at least drawing on the imagery. And it could still be that. It could be that this word was poisonous enough that it would be so loaded that to even use the word zealous really would conjure in the first century the mind of a Jewish zealot. But I thought it was going to go further. Let me keep explaining. So those people are zealous to win you over, but for no good. So either way, in that phrase, this looks bad. The agitators have all kinds of energy for you. Like they're acting like they really, really like you, but they don't actually, kind of like how politicians act every four years, all of a sudden, oh, you constituents are our best friends. I just love the great state of whatever state this is. You got the best people down here. You make the best fritters and hot dogs. I just absolutely they don't mean any of it. They're lying to you. They're very zealous when they hit that campaign trail, but it's not for good, and they're not actually your friend. What they want is to alienate you from us so that you may be zealous for them. Ah, okay. So Paul's saying their zeal isn't authentic. They don't actually like you. They're just throwing the energy at trying to bind you to a new set of loyalties, which means cutting off your old set of loyalties so that now you'll dedicate all of your energy toward them and behave in the same patterns they do, the same unflattering patterns. It's fine to be zealous, provided the purpose is good, and to be so always, and not just when I'm with you. Oh, okay, well, I agree with that. So zeal and energy is good. So then I start thinking, okay, well, maybe he's not referencing the zealots then, because I don't think Paul is saying it's fine to be how the zealots are. So I'm like, okay, I gotta go pull on this thread a little bit. Where else do the zealots come up? Well, the founder of the zealots, according to Josephus, is a guy named Judas the Galilean. And I got to thinking, I'm like, hey, he that's right, he comes up in the Bible. I did a video about this a while back when Paul and the Apostles, what? Okay, we're going too long. Uh, well, I'm not gonna quit. I'm just gonna keep going with this because I'm excited. I want to tell you about it. So there'll be a split in here somewhere, and then you'll be back, and then we'll just keep going, and it'll be great. Uh Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.