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          And then I&#39;m not sure.
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        <cite>SPEAKER_01</cite>
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          Hello, my friends. It&#39;s Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And if you didn&#39;t listen to yesterday&#39;s episode or like the last two days worth of episodes, today is going to be disappointing. And you&#39;re going to be like, I don&#39;t know why people listen to this show. Like it just seems like you&#39;re making us sit through you doing the work to prepare the podcast. That&#39;s dumb. You should do the work beforehand and not waste our time. That&#39;d be a reasonable critique. Except, we totally set up this great question over the last two days regarding Galatians 4, 1 through 5. Paul is doing one of two things here. He, in this passage, is either landing the plane on an analogy from everyday life that he&#39;s been using about how ancient households work, and about how when you&#39;re a kid, you got tutors and guardians and trustees. And you know, someday you&#39;re going to inherit the household. You&#39;re going to be an heir and you&#39;re going to have a role in it. But when you&#39;re a kid, basically you&#39;re like a slave in the ancient world, which isn&#39;t quite as harsh as you and I think of slavery from more recent history. And you don&#39;t have all the rights and you don&#39;t have all the ownership, but you&#39;re learning the ground rules, you&#39;re learning how things work. Paul is either one, finishing out that line of thought here in Galatians 4, to be like the law was really good and God used it for these purposes, but now in Christ you are maturing into an heir of the household, somebody who plays a role in it. He&#39;s either landing the plane on that analogy, or he&#39;s pinch zooming out a little bit more to say, the slavery, the state of subjection that you and I as humans were in is bigger than even the law. We were in a state of being subjected to the rules and forces, the elemental forces of nature. But in all of those things, he goes on to argue, then Christ showed up, when the fullness of time had arrived and all those rules changed. There&#39;s one turn of a phrase here that&#39;s very important as to which it is that Paul means, whether he&#39;s just landing the plane on that analogy, or whether he&#39;s both landing the plane on that analogy and pinch zooming out to say there&#39;s something even bigger here regarding your role and subjection to the forces of nature. There&#39;s one key phrase that sorts all of it out, and here we go making sense of it. In the 1984 edition of the New International Translation of the Bible, it says, So also when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But he goes on, you know, then Jesus showed up in the fullness of time and everything changed. All right, that&#39;s the NIV. In the English Standard Version, it says In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. And then over here, I&#39;ve got this beautiful King James edition by Thomas Nelson Publishers. My goodness, this is lovely. It&#39;s got like the big red calligraphy letters at the beginning of each paragraph. Oh, this is a wonderful looking Bible. This is the King James, this is old school. Galatians 4 3 here says, Even so, when we were children, we were in bondage under the elements of the world. Well, what&#39;s the best translation? The best way to know that is to go and look at the Greek. Now, when it comes to Bible translation, we don&#39;t have the original copies of the Bible. That makes sense. There&#39;s no original copies of really much of anything from the ancient world save like the occasional stone inscription, like Hammurabi&#39;s code from way back in the day. It was literally carved into a rock, and we found the rock. The Rosetta stone is carved into a rock. We eventually found the rock. But when it comes to texts that were written on parchment, on scrolls, that stuff doesn&#39;t age very well. Some of it&#39;ll survive for a long time if it&#39;s really cared for, but we don&#39;t have the original copy of any book of the Bible whatsoever, and that should come as no surprise. So instead, the way we figure out what the original language of the Bible is, is we take the gajillions of full copies and partial copies from the ancient world, from the pre-printing press world of all of these books of the Bible, and we line them up next to each other, and it&#39;s stunning how much they overwhelmingly agree. And where there are the occasional outliers, just like you&#39;re really good at your job and you can look at something and be like, okay, I know how somebody who doesn&#39;t do this would be confused here, but I look at this all the time. Like clearly, this is the way it was meant to be. There was just a little thing here that&#39;s off. Like this is what&#39;s supposed to be. In the same way you can do that with whatever you&#39;re great at, so people who look at texts for a living can easily look at it and almost always without controversy discern this is what the text said. So, in this ancient manuscript informed Greek New Testament that I&#39;ve got in front of me, I am turning over here to Galatians chapter four, and there&#39;s just one word or turn of a phrase that I want to pinch zoom in on, and that is this one right here. In Greek, this word that&#39;s getting rendered elemental or elements in the King James is I gotta sound it out. It&#39;s Stoichion. Stoichion. I think I&#39;m saying that right. All right, there&#39;s our word. Now I&#39;ve got this thing called a lexicon. It&#39;s like a dictionary of all the Greek words, the ancient Greek words that get used in the Old Testament. And there&#39;s just a a simple code here for that word. Every word gets assigned uh a code letter in the strong&#39;s lexicon. It&#39;s uh G4747, is what I&#39;m looking for. So, or G4748, depending on the form. Okay. Looks like this is basically used to convey the idea of element or elemental, rudimentary, principle, like the most fundamental level of a thing. Okay. Seems like the King James is maybe going with the most literal translation here based on what this word is. Now I can dig a little deeper on this other resource I have over here that tells me other places outside the Bible where this kind of language is used called Thayer&#39;s Greek lexicon. And this points me to a whole bunch of places not in the Bible where this same ancient Greek word stoichion was used, this word for elements or elemental. That points me toward a book that I have on my shelf by Plato called the Timaeus. I have this book because it was assigned to me in a class one time in grad school, and it was a very challenging read for me, but also it&#39;s the moment in my life where I realized, whoa, the old video game, earth, wind, fire, water, elemental, constructive things, that&#39;s from Plato. That&#39;s from the ancient Greeks. It&#39;s not just video game lore. Oh, fascinating. And in the Timae, hang on. In the Timaeus, which is a book about not really a book. It&#39;s a dialogue about the nature of things, the nature of nature and existence and where everything came from. A lot of Plato&#39;s ideas for how existence came into being, how it&#39;s held together, what it all really means, are born out of this dialogue, the Timaeus. In the Timaeus, there&#39;s a character named Timaeus, who&#39;s talking with some other people, including Socrates, and they&#39;re all talking about where everything came from. And Socrates, he likes Timaeus. He compliments him. He&#39;s like, excellent, Timaeus, I like your manner of approaching the subject. Proceed. And Timaeus takes Socrates&#39; permission to keep talking. Socrates is clearly the big important person in the room. He goes on to say a bunch of stuff that is very interesting, and I&#39;d like to read it all to you, but I&#39;m not gonna I&#39;m just gonna skip to where he uses this term Stoichion, which is here. And as the world was composed of solids between the elements stoichion of fire and earth, God placed two other stoichion elements of air and water and arranged them in a continuous proportion. And this is fascinating. He then drafts out math from fire, air, air, water, air, water, water, and earth and how they all relate to each other and proposes what looks like to me a harmony and a union, he says, between the four elements that creates some sort of golden or perfect ratio. Is he talking about the golden mean that&#39;s baked into all of math? I don&#39;t know. This is complex, and I&#39;m doing this on the fly, and I don&#39;t want to try to sort through everything that Timeus said twenty, three hundred and sixty years ago right now because it&#39;s complicated. Here&#39;s what I&#39;m driving at. Stoichion, at least 350 plus 50, 400, 410-ish years before Paul used that word, was being famously used to talk about the guts of nature, the stuff that makes nature what it is. And Paul, who is clearly a mega genius and clearly well informed on the history of philosophy and everything else, he chose to use the word stoichion here. Well, there are other words that he could have used here that would have been more in keeping with the theme of a noble estate and a young person growing up in that estate and eventually going through a rite of passage and ascending into a role as an heir and an agent of the noble house or of the kingdom, being robed in the noble attire of his father with his house sigil on him. He could have leaned into a whole bunch more stuff there, but instead he goes to this very well known word, this very well known language about these elements that Timaeus is talking about, Socrates and Plato are discussing, these things that the Greeks would have thought of as being the groundworks, the undergirding, the framework of everything. In the physical world, nothing exists that is beyond this. Now they believed in an abstract world, but in the physical world, everything&#39;s made of that, and all the math that makes order and morality come out of it is born out of a simple equation, a mathematical relationship between those four elements. I think it&#39;s way more fun and interesting to give Paul the benefit of the doubt here and give him credit, given how much he nods to Greek stuff in other parts of the New Testament, to assume that what he&#39;s doing here is doing one of those, hey, if you caught it, great, this is going to be more fun. If you didn&#39;t, eh, you didn&#39;t catch it, it&#39;s still totally going to work. I use this example all the time. This is probably the fifth time in the history of the podcast I&#39;ve said this. If we&#39;re going along and you and I are having a conversation, or you&#39;re like, I&#39;m giving a talk in front of a bunch of people, it&#39;s very, very important. And I&#39;m talking about how fleeting life is and about how much our stuff is it all turns into dust and you don&#39;t get to keep it. Maybe I&#39;m talking about the Sermon on the Mount and how you&#39;ve got to store up treasures for yourself where moth and rust don&#39;t destroy and where thieves don&#39;t break in and steal. I might just drop in the middle of all of that some phrase like, You can cling closely to your empire of dirt, but eventually it&#39;ll just slide through your fingers. Now, if someone is familiar with Nine Inch Nails, the band Trent Reznor, Johnny Cash, who famously covered a song called Hurt, written by Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor, then they&#39;re going to have all the imagery of that Johnny Cash song that he made that he covered at the end of his life. They&#39;re going to have all the darkness of the imagery of the band Nine Inch Nails and everything that goes along with that line, My Empire of Dirt. And it&#39;s going to bolster and enhance what I&#39;m saying. Because it&#39;s just with one turn of a phrase, it conjures a mountain of imagery for people who are in the know. But I&#39;m guessing there are a lot of you here who are like, nine-inch what? Trent Who? Johnny Cash. Well, all of you have heard of Johnny Cash. Maybe you didn&#39;t know he covered that song. It just doesn&#39;t resonate with you. It doesn&#39;t mean anything. But also, if I say my empire of dirt, you don&#39;t need to know the song. You can kind of figure out what that means. It&#39;s good enough. Even if that flies right by you, great. I&#39;m going to keep plugging away at this and doing all of this in real time in one sit-down session at the desk here, but there&#39;s no way I&#39;m going to subject you to all of this in one episode. So we&#39;re going to continue this fun little exercise in doing Bible work and trying to understand this with our own brains and our own eyes tomorrow, picking right up where we left off, which will be literally wherever Jeff decides to insert this little transition that I&#39;m recording after the fact. So I&#39;m going to keep working on this, and I&#39;ll see you tomorrow. I&#39;m Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let&#39;s do this again soon.
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