Hello, my friends. It's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are at the very end of our nerd arc of this season, where we picked a Bible conundrum and we're doing the work in real time to try to sort through what the best read on this Bible conundrum is. Paul turns this phrase. He says, So also, when you were children, you were in slavery under the elements of the world, or another translation renders it the elementary principles of the world. Yet another says the basic principles of the world. And I want to know what the heck he means by that. So we're digging into the Greek and the history around this word, and Greek philosophy, and Plato, and Aristotle and Socrates, and I think it's super fun. Hopefully you're having fun too, but if you're not, today will be the end of it. All right, let's pick up where we left off yesterday and we'll round this thing out. So here's what I think Paul is doing in Galatians chapter 4 after going and pulling on the thread with you in real time here over these last couple of conversations. And so let me give you my little annotated reading of this passage and then we'll put this to bed and we'll move on to the next stuff in Galatians 4. In the end of Galatians 3, I think Paul is saying, hey, we've been through a lot of hard stuff here theologically, but let me get toward wrapping up my analogy. The law was great. God did a great job with it. It serves a wonderful purpose. Salvation and right standing before God is not one of those purposes. It's a tough trustee, a tough teacher. For when we were in the metaphorical kid era of faith and relationship with God, but now through Christ we've moved into the metaphorical heir era, H-E-I-R, air era. And now here's my final thought on that. What I am saying, Galatians 4, 1, is that as long as the heir is a child, he's no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. See, Paul says, that kind of finalizes my analogy. Let me just finalize it a little further, though, Paul says. He's subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. But so also, and this is annotation, paraphrases mine, dare I say, in an even bigger perspective, even beyond that as well, when we were children we were in slavery under the elemental forces of the world, the elements of the world, something even bigger than just what's inside the walls of the metaphorical noble household in which we were metaphorically being raised? There's just the question of the bigger world in general. Even if you don't know what to make of the law, how much more so does everybody understand that we're all subject to the laws of entropy and physics and the world we all get older? Our bodies break, things break down, the physical elements that undergird everything will one day have their way with all of our bodies. These ground rules feel inescapable, like this would never change. All of that's very much paraphrased mine. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. I think there's a big spike of the football moment for Paul. And I think that by invoking the word stoichion, it's a spike of the football for everybody who's hearing the letter to the Galatian church, the Galatian Greeks who are there as Gentiles, but would be very familiar with Greek thought, as well as the Jewish-minded Christians who are in the room, and maybe even the non-Christian Jewish agitators, Paul is saying, all of time, whichever one of these threads you are descended from, Greek thought thread, Gallic thread, Jewish Old Testament thread, the law, whatever thread that you are coming from, as we are all gathered here together to work this through, the pivot point for all of it, the summation of all of these things that seemed unbreakable, the hard-written rules of your story, wherever you're coming from, ethnically, culturally, it all pivots in Christ. That is the fullness of time, no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, about where the world came from, no matter which philosophers you read, whether you're keenly aware and feel the burden of the law like me and Peter do, or whether you have no clue about any of that stuff, like a Gentile outsider might have no clue. No matter who you are, the fullness of time takes all of that and rounds it out and takes us to this new, truer, greater reality, this truer, greater kingdom with the truest, greatest king, with the truest, greatest narrative, with the truest, greatest explanation for how everything is and how the world works and life and death and God and everything. And all of that happened in the fullness of time when, in this incident, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law that we might receive the full rights of sons. If I'm wrong, and Paul really is just landing the plane on the metaphor here, uh, that's great. That's just excellent Bible. And he just chose the colorful Greek word for elements here, but he's still just only talking about the law. Great, that's awesome, super cool. If he is giving us a little bit of that my empire of dirt nod for anybody who might catch it, for any reader who might happen to understand, to enrich that out for part of his audience, but it'll fly over the head of part of his other audience. Cool. That's even more fun for me to imagine is going on there. And whether that is indeed what Paul means in this case or not, what I just said about the whole flow of history pivoting on Jesus, it's still true, either way. You might just have to look to other parts of the Bible to really truly undergird that. I think this kind of stuff is fun. For me, this is time well spent, but also I need to make a note on the way out the door out of this little arc that we just got done with here on the whole question of the elements and Greek philosophy and all of that. You don't have to do all of this stuff. You don't have to be into all of this stuff. You don't have to study the Bible this way, you don't have to learn Greek. I mean, I think it could be useful and cool, but I'm not that great at any of this stuff. I don't want this to be intimidating. That's my point. The thesis of this podcast is you can do this. The Bible's amazing. I think the God of all of creation in the universe is on the other side of it. If the Bible is from God, then indeed it tells us that he would like to be known and he is making himself available to be known. The scriptures themselves teach that God opens our eyes to what's going on there. The very fact that there is a Bible means that the Bible wants to be understood and the God behind it wants to be known. And I would never want to give the impression that you've got to go back to school for two or four or six or eight years and learn six or eight new languages and put every single second of all of your time that you have into this and feel guilty for the time that you're at work providing for your family or whatever. And this is you got to do all this other stuff, or you're not taking it seriously, and that doesn't work. That is not the case. As part of why I'm grateful that there are professionals who have dedicated their lives to all of this stuff, and when they present their work well, we can go and look at it and understand whether they did a good job or not, oftentimes pretty quickly. But again, if the net effect of the last three days of what we did is to make you feel discouraged and overwhelmed by this, then here's a straight up apology. That is not how I would want you to feel coming out of this. The point of all of this is to make you feel optimistic that you can get it and you can do this and you can understand it, and that you can know God, and that you can have God in your life, and that you can have clarity in your life as to who he is and what this means and what he's into and where you fit. But also at some point, pretty much everybody's gonna ask the question, how do we know any of this stuff? And from time to time, I think it's cool to pull back the curtain on that and be like, yeah, here's how we know some of those details that undergrewed the conversations and that the scholars give us to help us understand the text. Because now we've done just a little tiny bit of that work ourselves together. Okay, that was a lot, but I had fun. Forward in Galatians chapter four, next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.