Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast. I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you to everybody who's been here since the beginning of this thing. It occurs to me we've been doing this for quite a while. This is our fifth season. And some of you have been here every day since the very beginning, which is wild. That is a lot of time hanging out together. Thank you. That is not lost on me. I probably don't say thank you enough. Some of you have been hanging out with me even longer than that. I just passed my 10-year anniversary on YouTube from the time I published my first video a little bit earlier this month here. That's pretty crazy. Some of you have been here since the beginning of that. I'm looking at you, Sarah Sims. You were the first person who I didn't know who saw my stuff on the internet was like, I will watch your thing, and we have never met. And I just think that's the coolest thing ever. And I will, I will never forget that. I'm very grateful to you and always will be. But there's a whole bunch of you who have met along the way. I know your names, I've seen your pictures and your avatars around. It's kind of wild to think about how many of you I've interacted with in one way or another. Hopefully, I've been nice every time. Like, I don't know, you all seem really cool to me. It's been overwhelmingly great. But also, it occurs to me that there are some of you who are just jumping in right now, and your first time hanging out here is in this season, the book of Galatians. And I gotta tell you, on behalf of me and everybody who's been around here for a while, this is a pretty weird season of the podcast because it's so much theology. There's no, I mean, there's not no plot to the book of Galatians, but we're working our way through this letter written by the Apostle Paul to a very mixed room of recipients, probably an uncomfortable room, maybe even a little bit of a hostile room of recipients there in Galatia, and it's dense. Even other parts of the Bible say that these letters of Paul are dense. And it's just a little different experience than working through Matthew or Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and the whole Persian era of the Old Testament. Because with those, yeah, I just sit down every day. In my Bible, I have a podcast Bible. It's just for this. And it sits here on this desk where I record, and it's open to whatever I did last yesterday. And you just pick up where the story left off and you get as far as you can get. And you can chase down any rabbit trail, but the story is what guides us. So, you know, it's easy to reset it and keep track of it. But this theology stuff in Galatians, where we're not clearly moored to one simple through-line story through the whole book, I think that does make it a little bit more challenging. But I would submit this to you. I also think it makes it very rewarding. And that is what the last week has been like for me as I've been processing this stuff through with you, and I'm I've come upon another thing today that I'm just deeply excited about at the level of the heart. And yeah, we goof around a lot, and there are a lot of fart jokes, and I always say fart jokes. I never actually remember to do any fart jokes. Fart jokes to me is just like the metaphorical thing for being an idiot and screwing around and just being however you actually are. So, okay, there aren't actually that many fart jokes. It'd probably be better if there were more. But the point is, like, we're having fun, we're doing this thing together, we're talking about this material like actual normal people, like how we would actually talk if we were hanging out of the chilies or something. But from time to time, I think it's very important for me to just acknowledge this is affecting me and changing me. I think God is on the other side of this thing, and uh I'm very grateful for the time that we get to spend together. And this is another one of those things that we get to look at today that even though, yeah, it's dense theology that gets us here, it's dense theology with a big payoff, and it's worth it. It can be really tempting to run from the theology stuff in the Bible. It's even fashionable in some Christian circles, disappointingly, to be like, theology's for eggheads. I don't really do that. I just feel God. That's stupid. Feeling God is theology. Some of it's hard, some of it's medium, some of it's easy. There's uh even a Bible verse about this. You know, like newborn babies crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you can grow up in your salvation. The idea is that yeah, I mean, we're talking about the infinite God on the other side of this thing. It's gonna be a little bit complicated, and that is okay. That's a feature, not a bug. I would not want to devote my life to pursuing a God who I could figure out in a month. That to me would sound like a man-made God. Rather, in doing this podcast, weirdly, we're joining in a very ancient tradition of a lifetime of reflection and meditation on the Word of God. We've got this beautiful material at the end of Galatians chapter three, this 14-point swing, this reversal we've been talking about. There's all this language about being, you know, subjected prisoners to the law, locked up and all of that, and then it flips. You're all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ. For all of you who were baptized in Christ, have clothed yourself with Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you're all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. Now, out of the thick language of Galatians, we've bounced over to Romans and we've been unpacking what's going on over here. And in Romans chapter four, where Paul, the author of Romans, who's also the author of Galatians, in Romans chapter four, where Paul is echoing so much of the same material from Galatians chapter three, and he hits on this beautiful passage that I love and I want to read to you. It says, Now when man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness. We talked about this yesterday. If you make a contract with somebody, and then you do the work that you said you'd do, they pay you what you are owed, and the contract is fulfilled, and that's it. What Paul is saying is that that's not how this works with God, that it is the gift of God. He doesn't owe us these things. It's not a paycheck for our good behavior or our work completed. Rather, right standing with God is a gift of God born out of his grace, born out of his character. Paul goes on here in Romans chapter four. Uh verse 6. David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works. My friends, I know you're doing other things right now. I don't ask this of you very often, but try to tune it all out for just a second. This is an amazing chunk of ancient Bible right here from David, a guy who had problems and needed forgiveness. Listen to what he wrote. This is Psalm 32 that's being quoted here in Romans 4. Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered, blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him. And if you chase that reference over to Psalm 32 and you read the rest of this Psalm of David, you realize that what you're getting here is a dude who's deeply repented. There's language here about what it was like, feeling the weight of his sin. He became painfully aware of it. When I kept silent my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me, my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. But then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I didn't cover up my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. This Psalm 32 heavily echoes Psalm fifty-one, which is a psalm that explicitly says that this is David processing what he got wrong, his colossal failure in his life, which was the whole affair with the woman bathing on the roof with Bathsheba. Make of the mechanics of how that all went down, whatever you want. I mean, the Bible makes it really clear. David had massive guilt in that situation. I mean, he sent her husband to the front line and then had him abandoned in battle so that he would die to try to cover up what David did with Bathsheba. I mean, he was this is not trifling. This is not an oopsie, I meant to do a nice thing, but I accidentally did a bad thing. This is a profound failure on the part of David. This is evil on the part of David. And here's some of the song he wrote coming out of that experience. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. It just sounds like Bible language. So many songs are based on this. Maybe it just washes over you and goes past you, like, yeah, God, forgive me. I like that forgiveness kind of stuff. But think about what he did and think about what he's asking for. Think about the stupidest, worst stuff you've ever done, and how you for me it's the shower when I feel just awful about a mistake, where you wish that time travel were a thing and you could go back and unmake it where you wish that somehow that utter stupidity, that embarrassment, that shame that you feel could be blotted out and erased from the records of time and history and reality. We have all felt that, maybe not quite to the degree that David feels it right here. But come on, let's not act like we're way better or different from this guy. We've done stupid things, even if they're not exactly those stupid things. We all know what guilt and deep regret feels like. And we all know in that moment how absolutely incredible it would be if somehow, miraculously, the weight of that crap and that garbage could be lifted off of our shoulders. He sounds like us. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion. Blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. Make it go away. You're the only one who's in a position to undo what I've done. Heal me of this. That's my language, not his, for I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only have I sinned, and I've done what is evil in your sight, so that you're proved right when you speak and are justified when you judge. I mean, he's not making excuses. There's nothing in here. It is line after line after line of him pleading for the forgiveness of God, and not just like a, hey, we're going to call this one even, I'll let it go, bro, kind of forgiveness, but for a cleansing, for a fixing of something that really should be irreparable before God, the damage is done. And yet, probably in the next psalm David wrote, or a psalm he wrote later, we get language like this: Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin, the Lord does not count against him. Here's why all that heavyweight theology that we've been wading through in Galatians matters for you and me. We're idiots. Full stop. You, me. We've done stupid stuff. Maybe you're still squeaky clean. Uh it's good for you. I don't know that it's gonna last. Also, it's really easy to miss stuff that's really actually deeply screwed up about ourselves and it occurs to us later. We're flawed people and we do dumb things, and a lot of times we don't even know that we did it. At some point, it will occur to all of us, and we will put both hands on our head and we will close our eyes and we will think to ourselves, how could I? We will feel the deep pain of regret. It's just part of the sailing ship of our lives that sails through time. There are barnacles that attach to the hole, and we're just not in a position to scrape them off. Every single one of us has or at some point is going to feel that sense of yearning for real, true, abiding, meaningful forgiveness before the one to whom ultimately we owe this debt, and that's God. Every single one of us is going to feel that. And there are sort of two strategies that get bandied about for how to acquire that forgiveness. One that we've looked at at length in the book of Galatians is be better. Just don't do bad things. Well, have you tried not making mistakes? Just really buckle down and get it right. Pull yourself up by your religious bootstraps and just stop thinking wrong things. And then God will be very impressed, and you will have right standing before God by simply not needing his forgiveness. Just do that. Well, that's one option. The reason that we've waded through all of this theology, and the reason it's important, is because Paul and the Bible in general needed to obliterate that notion in our brains and make it crystal clear. That's not how atonement happens, that's not how forgiveness happens, that's not how right standing before God happens. It's only through this other way. And Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. That's it. The grace of God, the forgiveness of God worked out through the work of Christ on the cross and in his resurrection. That's it. That is how sin is paid for. That's how the warm wash of forgiveness that is flowing over David that he is celebrating in Psalm 32 is made possible. It's not like David just went and 12 monkeys style traveled through time and undid the Uriah and Bathsheba thing. Time to us is linear. We cannot fix it. God is in a position where he can forgive, though. He can do stuff that we can't do. And maybe sometimes we've just been around Bible language so much that it doesn't hit as hard as it should, but this should hit. This is why we grind through the theology. It's so that that little voice in our head that says, Is this real or is this not? Do I actually believe this or do I not? Can be trusted. We grind through it so that we can feel and experience what David writes about when once again he says, Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him. Ultimately, our debt is before God. He's the reason we even know stuff is wrong. So it's to him who we owe it. He's the only one who's in a position to really efficaciously forgive it. And apparently he's offering that. Well that causes Paul in the book of Galatians to say, Why would you fools cut yourself off from that? Have you never done anything wrong? Have you never considered that you might need the forgiveness of God? Do you actually think that you can somehow outsmart time and the mind of God and human nature and earn that? No, it's the grace of God, it's the gift of God only. That's why Galatians has the tone. Because he knows that the people of Galatia are in danger of cutting themselves off from what David was experiencing and writing about in Psalm 32 right there. Paul wants the people of Galatia. Paul wants you and me, and frankly himself, to experience the grace and the confidence and the beauty and the cleansing of blessed is he whose sins are forgiven, with great confidence in the character of God with a grace and a forgiveness that isn't earned by us because we can't earn it anyway, but rather that is given by God at his own great expense. I know this is a long episode and we talked a lot about things today, but I wanted to put a cap on it since as I'm recording this is a Friday episode, and I want to move forward to Galatians chapter four on Monday or maybe Tuesday. So, big picture. Is theology hard and are certain parts of the Bible hard? Yes. Is Galatians 3? Kind of hard. Yes. Is some of the stuff in Romans? Kind of hard. Yes. But the Bible knows that. It anticipates that. It's okay. It's more than okay. It's worth it because as we really think through who God must be and what we are and the situation that we're in and put in that effort and reflect and meditate on all of these things, what's on the other end of that is confidence that there is forgiveness from God, that that's an actual thing, and that you and I can have confidence in that and bask in that the way David is doing there in Psalm 32. There you go. Little longer conversation today. Thanks for hanging out with me. I know that was a lot. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.