You're listening to the 10 Minute Bible number podcast, it's been a ton free daily deep minute Bible, and right now we're talking about collations.
SPEAKER_00Did you take Spanish in high school? Do you remember any of that stuff? I took it in high school, but I didn't care. I was making a point. I was busy cutting off my nose despite my own face. Because I didn't think we should have to learn Spanish in America. I thought this was America. In America, we speak American. So everybody should just learn American. Come on. I don't know. Maybe there's still a point to that. I mean, having a shared language so that we can have a culture together and everybody can know each other. Sorry, I'm bumping the microphone. That's a good thing in principle. But also somewhere along the way, I've figured out it's really hard to learn languages and it takes a minute, maybe even a generation, for a family to fully internalize English and have it be the language that carries all of the emotions and thought and history. And even then, it's never going to carry all of them. If you're a bilingual family or a bilingual tradition, there's always going to be ideas and concepts and emotions and memories that are better carried in one of those two languages than the other. Because not all languages carry all concepts with equal efficiency and effectiveness, or with equal specificity, even. So over the years, just quick update, I realized I was being an idiot in my high school Spanish class. Like, I should learn Spanish. And so I started working on it. I worked on it really hard. I got done with college and I took a bunch of college classes. I don't know exactly how many, but maybe like another minor or something. There's a lot of Spanish that I've taken over the years. I started taking notes, laying in bed at night, and working through Spanish books. And if you spoke Spanish with me, you'd be like, huh, it doesn't really show you're sort of terrible at this. So look, I'm not good at it, but it's something I want to be good at. For me, it's kind of a life discipline, a spiritual discipline thing, because it makes me think outside myself and it makes me think about how language equals concepts in a little different way, which is a big deal because I do a lot with language, but ideas are bigger than just the vocabulary of the one language that we natively speak. Ideas exist beyond words. Words try to capture those ideas, and different languages, once again, have different advantages for capturing, articulating efficiently different ideas. So, for example, there's a reason that opera keeps happening in Italian. It just works really well for carrying that style of communication and that melodic style of drama. There's a reason that we associate romance and seduction with French. It carries those concepts really well. I'm not terribly good at French, but I tried that for a while and I get it. I'm enough to understand. It does great at that. In English, we have one word for love that means I love pizza or I love my wife. I mean, that's crazy because we know intuitively those are different things. Well, in Greek, there's a bunch of words to describe more specific types of love, like brotherly love or erotic sexual love. In Spanish, one of the things that you get that I think is so helpful, and this isn't exclusive to Spanish, but it's a really different thing from English, is you get two different words, well, more than that, but two commonly used words for to be. Now you think about it, of all the words that we use in language, to be, that verb, that is an action, by the way, it's not a noun. To be is one of the most important. Because how crazy is it that being is even a thing? That you and I even exist, that we can even understand each other, that your parents met on the right day and had an intimate time at the right moment. I mean, you wouldn't be you if that was like the next day or the next month, or it's just crazy that in the grand mathematical scheme of all the variables of the universe, you and I are here and that we're alive at the same time, and that we're made of the same stuff, and that you can understand me. And that if I was listening to you, I could understand it's crazy that we be. We probably should not be, mathematically at least, logically, it would be so much easier for there to be nothing, but instead there's something. It's wild. So this little word in any language is one that I think is a huge deal. To be. In Spanish, you have one version of the word to be that the word is estar, translates literally to be. Even if you've never done any Spanish thing or whatever, you've heard people use estar in a conjugated form when talking about themselves. If somebody says estoy, they're saying I am. If somebody says estás, they mean you are. But that Spanish verb for to be estar is generally used for temporary things, states of being that aren't permanent, that might change quickly. So for example, your emotions. If I say estoy contento, I'm saying I'm happy. Yeah, but of course I probably won't be in a while, because circumstances change and life changes. I mean, at some point, estoy triste, I'm not gonna feel happy. And in English, we'd just say, I am happy, I am sad, I am American, I am a boy. But in Spanish, there's another verb for those more permanent states of being, and this is ser. If you've never studied Spanish, you might not have ever heard anybody say that one, but you've definitely heard somebody say, Yo soy. Well, soy is the conjugated form of ser, and it means I am, but it's a permanent I am. So I might say estoy contento, and that means I am happy right now. That's why I used estoy instead of soy, star instead of ser. But if I'm talking about myself, I would never say estoy vikingo, I am a Viking, because I don't think I'm ever probably gonna be anything other than a Viking or part Viking. Instead, I would choose the permanent state of being one, which is soy vikingo. I am a Viking, and I guess I always will be. In English, if you want to differentiate between a state of being that you latch onto for a while or that's just where you are for the moment, and something that is permanent, you have to do that with a lot more words. In Spanish, my point is, it's just baked in to the most fundamental hardware of the language, and native speakers don't even think about it, it just happens. Knowing this comes in really handy when we read an English translation of the New Testament, say the book of Galatians, for example, and we come across language and descriptions of who we are as people apart from Christ, who we are as people in Christ. When we come upon these descriptions of our essence, our being, it's helpful to ask the question, okay, a star or ser? Are we talking about something here that I am for a little bit when we talk about being a Christian or being in Christ? Or are we talking about something that I am forever? Again, in English, it's I am or I am, it's to be or to be. There's no simple indicator as to whether we're talking about a permanent or temporary state. So we depend on the context to sort that out. If you can't tell, by the way, you're like, wait, how are we already like this is a whole episode? What are we doing? Yeah, that's right. Because we're about to go on an arc, and it's gonna be a bun arc, and this sets up the whole thing. So thank you for indulging me here. So listen to all the to be, the you are, the is language throughout this last chunk of Galatians chapter three, because this whole passage, the glory of it, the excitement of it that Paul is giving us, it all has to do with essence and being, who you were, and now who you are. Is it who you kind of were, and then now who you kind of are until things change? Or does this language sound like who you as star were in the past before God changed you into who you say are now? I kind of just spoiled the whole exercise. It's what I just said. You'll hear what I'm talking about. Galatians 3 23. Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So we were prisoners. The language of the text indicates that I don't know how we were ever gonna get out of that on our own, but something does change as we read along. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we're no longer under the supervision of the law. So a lot of things are moving and changing there. There's a dynamic. We're in a different place in those three verses in our relationship with God and eternity and guilt and the law and all of that stuff. There's a lot in flux. There's a lot of a star there in terms of who we are. But now listen to the way the language pivots to permanent. This is who you are, this is how things are in Christ. Verse 26. You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. Does that sound like a star language or Sare? It's pretty clearly Sare language, to be permanently. You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. Now, typically we might think of clothes as something you take off and you put on, you put on something else, then you take that off, and then you put on something else. But over the next few days, I think what we're going to notice is that when this language happens in the Bible, there's a greater permanence to it. This is a motif, a metaphor, an image used throughout the Bible to talk about a ser level transformation, a transformation of the essence. Paul goes on. That's wild. Those are all things you would use ser for. Soy, judio, I am Jewish. Soy griego, I am Greek. Soy un hombre, I am a man. Soy una mujer, I am a woman. You would expect for those things to be absolutely permanent the way they're being explained there. But the first phrase of that verse is there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Okay, well then what is there that is more sare than sare, that is more permanent than permanent? For you are all one in Christ Jesus. What this is saying is that the highest, greatest, truest, most real expression of the identity of a person, of a human that could ever be attained is to be in Christ Jesus, is to be a son, a daughter of God, to be a son, a daughter of the king, to be an heir and have a share in this kingdom. That is the truest, realist thing a person could ever be. If you belong to Christ, then you are Sara Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. My friends, you and I will be in the star sense, temporarily, about a bajillion things over the course of our lives. We'll be an employee of this thing or that thing, we'll be a teammate or a part of this organization, we will be a Netflix subscriber, we will be a pedestrian, we will be a motorist, we will be a passenger. Those are all a star. They're all things that are coming and going. Now, even if in some of those cases you might use SAR just because of the way the Spanish language evolved, the point is, if you really think about it, they're all temporary. They all come and go, they all turn over. None of those things I just mentioned, though important in the moment, define ultimately the reality of who you are. And this passage in Galatians 3 that's coming on the back end of some very hard theology is driving it home to this point. The truest, realist sense, expression of being for anybody that could ever be is in Christ. This isn't something you dip in and out of. These aren't clothes that you throw on for a minute and then wad up and throw in the laundry pile and put on some new clothes. If you are clothed with Christ, this is the seriest thing of all Sare. That is, the God who has introduced himself as being, remember, he said his name is I am to Moses back in the Old Testament, is the God who deals in being throughout the whole Bible, throughout all of history, in your life and in mine. This is the God who is so powerful that he deals in the realm of true essence, of true being. And apparently that isn't just about him and his personality. Apparently, that is something that is externalized, and that same power over the very essence of things is something that is applied to the person who is in Christ, like you or me reading this today. There's a thread we got to pull on. Dang, that is two long episodes in a row. I need to be an adult about this and get this back to the agreed upon time frame. This is gonna take a few days to pull on this thread. There's a bit of a metaphor there. It wasn't intentional, but I'm leaning into it now. The thread I want to pull on is the one of the motif of clothing as being a biblical image throughout the old and new testament of what it is to sare, become something, to permanently be made something new by the God who is I am and deals in being. And understandably, that could feel a little bit heady and philosophy-y and grammar-y and all of that. You might be like, I don't know, this little arc we're about to go on is for me. Well, that's the beauty of Paul tapping into the biblical motif of being clothed with here, because we all understand that concept and it's going to simplify and make this idea pop for us as we round out Galatians 3 and get into Galatians 4. That is so much and also plenty for now. So I'm at Essays Laura Biblica de Diez Minutos. Agamos lo de nuevo pronto.