Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are working on the book of Galatians. We've been in Galatians chapter 3 for quite a while now, if I'm to be honest. But you know, it's important stuff and it's complicated. It takes a minute to go through it the right way. We're on this verse right now, Galatians 3 14. It says he, God, redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus. There's this concept in the whole Old Testament of God's chosen people, the Hebrews, the Israelites, the Jews, they are descendants of Abraham. And God makes a special promise to Abraham that he's got some unique blessings in store for he and his descendants. They're going to be a great nation, all of this stuff. But part of the promise that God makes to Abraham is that through Abraham and his descendants, all the nations of the world are going to be blessed. Well, guess what? I'm not Jewish. So I'm part of the all the other nations, part of that promise. And frankly, I'm very honored and very grateful to have been thought of all the way back there in Genesis chapter 12. So what we've been doing the last few days is going through the Old Testament and doing this sort of this quick overview, this quick journey through the timeline of the Old Testament to see how God's promise to Abraham about the unique role of the Jews and the blessings he has in mind for the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, how that is held up, but also how God has never wavered on his plan that the rest of everybody was also going to be blessed, that there would be a redemption and a restoration for everybody. There's a plan for all the nations that runs clearly through the Old Testament. And today we're going to round out our journey through a bunch of those references. So if you didn't catch the last two episodes, you might want to because this will make more sense. But also, it's the internet. You can come at it however you would like. We're going to have fun either way. All right, I'm going to have my friend Jeff play some music, and then we're going to pick up where we left off yesterday. Here we go. Humanity has a problem. There is a curse. There is the surge coming. And Jews, Gentiles alike, we are all born into and earn ourselves, being on the unprotected, bad side of the surge protector. Yet it looks very much like deliverance is inbound for Jews and Gentiles alike to move us from the bad side of the surge protector to the protected side of the surge protector. But we're still not done looking at Old Testament examples of this. Jeremiah, he was even sadder than Habakkuk. He was a contemporary of Habakkuk. He was aware of the same thing that the Babylonians were coming with Nebuchadnezzar, and he is known as the weeping prophet because of it. I mean he just had to watch this whole calamity unfold in slow motion. So maybe somebody that sad would prophesy things like, ah, nothing's going to work out. The plan's not going to work out. The plan changes nope. Jeremiah 16, 19 through 21, he says this, O Lord, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in times of distress. To you the nations will come from the ends of the earth and say, Our fathers possessed nothing but false gods, worthless idols that did them no good. Do men make their own gods? Yes, but they're not gods. Therefore I will teach them. This time I will teach them my power and might, then they will know that my name is the Lord. Even in the midst of calamity, even in the midst of grief, Jeremiah confirms the plan is still on. This surge protection is going to be for everybody. But you know, Jeremiah, he's writing around 600 BC. The full shock of the Babylonian thing hasn't happened yet. He hasn't felt it yet. Maybe it'll be different, and maybe it'll feel like nah now the plan is off after the actual calamity occurs and the temple gets destroyed. So let's fast forward the better part of another hundred years and check in with another prophet to find out if the plan is still on. This time we're going to look at what the prophet Zechariah wrote. How do we find Zechariah? Zebra, Zephaniah, Hurdle, Haggai, Zamboni, Zechariah, machines. Micah, I know it's ridiculous, but it works for me. Huge things have changed in roughly the century between what Jeremiah wrote and what Zechariah is writing. The Babylonians, yeah, they were a big deal. They destroyed the temple, all the things God said would happen. They did that, but then they got beat by the Persians. And now a whole new people group is in charge. Cyrus the Great is come and gone. Darius the Great is now the great king of Persia, and the temple's actually getting rebuilt during the time that Zechariah is writing. Even through calamity, God is keeping his promise to the descendants of Abraham. But what about the part of the promise that involves the outsiders, the Gentiles, the you and me, if you're not Jewish? Well, Zechariah 2, 11 goes like this Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people. I will live among you, and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you. Okay, well, that's pretty smoking gun, I guess there's our answer. The plan is still on, but Zechariah speaks to it again right at the end of his book in Zechariah 14, 16, and I'm going to read you that one too, because I think it's real good and you're going to like it. Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the king, the Lord Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. Huh? All the people who used to be the enemies, something happens. There's some future reform, some future revival or awakening, some future thing where the scales fall off of the eyes of all the nations and the Gentiles and the people who were opposed to God and didn't get it, and all of a sudden they're going to Jerusalem not to tear down its walls and destroy the temple and kill everybody and take them all as slaves. They're going to Jerusalem to worship God, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm with their Jewish brothers and sisters. Well, that is quite the vision of the future that we get as we're in the closing pages of the Old Testament. Now I had all these ambitions that in this little Old Testament jaunt, I would just roll right into the New Testament. I don't know what we're even at. We're maybe I'm gonna have to break this up. Two days, three days on this Old Testament journey from the very beginning to the very end of it, seeing the continuity of this plan. So I'll save our jaunt through the New Testament and how it plays out there until next time around. But for crying out loud, you just saw the same thing I did. The plan never wavered, not even a little bit. It just didn't matter what was going on, even the biggest narrative moments of the Old Testament, the parts of it where you would feel like maybe the whole God thing is just fake. Maybe the whole deal is off. Persia, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt. Maybe these geopolitical, military things are just bigger than God's plan. But all of those things that seem like such a big deal in the moment, and like they might cause God to go, oh, my plan wasn't that great. Let me just uh augment my plan. Let's try something different. Uh-uh. They all just sort of come and go, and then the next big thing happens, and there's the next big war and the next big empire and the next great king. May he live forever, who doesn't live forever. But the word of the Lord endures forever. It's real steady, and the plan never wavered. You just saw it with your own eyes, and by that I mean heard it with your own ears. So that is what Paul is riffing on. That's what he's talking about, that's what he's pointing his audience to in the book of Galatians. Again, Paul is not initiating some new novelty or reform or change of the rules to the religion to be like, and also it's for outsiders now. Nope. It was always intended to be. It's just that now because Christ has become the curse, because Christ has become sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God, because he has become the surge protector, now it's possible for everybody to be on the safe side, the protected side, the right side of the surge protector at Christ's expense. And Paul is pretty excited that this moment has come to pass in his lifetime. This moment that was predicted from ancient days of yore over and over and over again by the law and the prophets and the kings and the psalms and the whole narrative of the Old Testament. It's here. It's come to pass in Christ. And Paul is going to vigorously defend this blessing in God. He's going to vigorously defend the true message of the gospel. And he's going to vigorously defend the idea and the truth that everybody, Jew, Gentile, male, female, slave, free, everybody through faith in Christ can be on the protected side, the right side, the safe side, the good side of the surge protector. We'll look at some New Testament payoffs on all of this stuff next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.