Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I've missed you. I know it doesn't seem to you like I've been gone because I worked ahead. Normally this is a daily podcast, and I just do it every day, and you know, we check in. It's cool. But I've been gone for a while. I've been traveling with my daughters, who are both seniors in their final semester of school, and they wanted to do a trip with their dad and a couple of friends. So we had a great big adventure together, and it was great. And they're fixing to leave and go do whatever's next in life, and it's killing me. Just killing me. And so it was so meaningful to get to spend that time with them. But uh the point is I had to work ahead a little bit. So for me, I feel like we haven't hung out in a really long time, and it's nice to be back. For you, it's like, why? We just you know, we just did the thing yesterday. We were talking about Isaiah 53 and the whole suffering servant thing and Christ becoming a curse for us, and in doing so, defeating the curse of the law. But you know, for me, it's been a while. The point is, I miss ya, and it's nice to be back, and we're in Galatians chapter three, and we're gonna talk about that in just a moment. But first, I'll tell you something else we haven't talked about in a long time, and that is any kind of example or metaphor from the whole Marvel Avengers cinematic universe thing, because I don't know, I just got bored with it, I guess. We're gonna go back in time just a little bit, and remember the time that the Hulk had to volunteer in one of these movies to take on a tremendous pain for everybody else. You can totally see where this is going, it's completely transparent. There's this uh glove in the Avengers movies, it's a celestial glove imbued with massive power. The kind of power that could be used for good, that could be used for evil, the kind of power you just you have to respect it. Using it comes at a cost. Somebody used it for great evil in one of the earlier Avengers movies. Well, the Avengers they get their mitts on this thing eventually, and then they gotta try to undo it. They gotta use the power of the glove and the magic rocks that are in there to undo this great evil. But it's there's so much power involved that they're all looking around. They're like, well, who's gonna actually put the glove on and do the thing? Because it's gonna hurt a lot. You're gonna have to absorb all of this pain. And you know, it comes down to the Hulk, because the Hulk is big and he's powerful, and even if you don't know stuff about comic books, you've heard of the Hulk, he's a giant green guy, and so he's the one who feels like he can take it and he pays a great price to do that thing, to absorb that curse, if you will. And the whole motif in storytelling, especially sci-fi and comic book storytelling, of absorbing a curse is something that we could probably think of 50 examples of, where there's a thing, there's a great power, uh maybe a great evil, there's some thing that just has to be purged, but it can't just go out into nowhere. It's like uh electricity almost. It's like it's gotta be grounded, it's gotta go into something to be filtered, to be absorbed because it can't just linger, it has to be eaten, consumed. Well, in a sense, every time you see that motif play out in sci-fi or comic book storytelling, it's all a nod back to Jesus. It's all a nod back to the big story. And this isn't me reading that in and being like, oh, because Jesus is like a comic book hero. No, it's because it's right here in Galatians, it's all over the Bible. The idea that Christ absorbed, consumed, drank, took upon himself this curse that couldn't just linger out there. It had to go somewhere. The curse had to do its curse thing. That was inevitable. And if the curse thing had been allowed to play out naturally and affect everyone to whom it was directed, it would have been catastrophic for everyone. But instead, enter Jesus, the one guy who, stretching the metaphor here, is the Hulk. He has what it takes to endure that thing. Well, ultimately, Jesus dies a literal death on the cross in the process of absorbing that curse, but he's raised back to life on the third day. Curse is absorbed, death is defeated, the forgiveness of God is made available, the entire story and impetus of the law is completed, and now all that's left is for everybody who's standing there looking at this grand redemptive story and this one key moment where Christ absorbs the curse. All that's left is for everybody to be like, okay, well, wait a minute. What are the implications of this? What exactly does that mean for me and for you and for people who live far away? What does this mean for our social orders? I mean, there's a lot of questions here that go with it. And Galatians is a letter that's sorting through that kind of stuff. What are the implications of Christ absorbing the curse? But here in Galatians 3, where we've been hanging out with admittedly a bunch of rabbit trails back into the Old Testament, here in Galatians 3, we're getting the crystal clear recap from Paul as to exactly what it is that has happened here plot-wise with Jesus. Now, once again, Paul is explaining all of this because some people had forgotten the plot. They were real excited about Jesus absorbing the curse when they first heard about it, but the idea of somebody else absorbing a curse on your behalf, it can be a little disorienting, a little confusing. You might have a little bit of survivor's guilt or something there. So it was really easy for other people to come along and screw the whole thing up. And that's what had happened to these Christians in Galatia. So Paul writes them a letter to straighten the thing out. And he's like, uh, yeah, you guys are great and everything. I like you, but I'm super disappointed that you've fallen for this fake version of the story that somebody made up where the curse hasn't been absorbed. I guess what are y'all doing? Let's straighten this thing out. And so then Paul goes through and he makes sure that his credentials are cleared up in front of everyone. He makes sure that some slander that had probably been thrown out there about him to discredit what he's going to say next about Jesus absorbing the curse. He makes sure that all of that is cleared up as well in the first chapter and a half. And then in the middle of Galatians chapter two, Paul pivots into this line of thought that we're still in in Galatians chapter three, which is a very theological line of thought, or I guess you could put it another way, it's a very narrative line of thought. Like, hey, let's make sure we're straight on what the plot is. And this is what Paul tells us the plot is. God revealed the law way back in the day, and the Jewish people have tried to bear the burden of that law for millennia, but they can't do it. No matter what, they just can't seem to get the thing right. Peter knows it, Paul knows it. Everybody who's a Jew by birth knows that a man is not justified by observing the law. Can't be done. He's like, look, the law is a dead end in the plot, and it comes with a curse. Now, the whole law isn't a curse. The law has blessings and curses in it, but the curse is a doozy. It's death and curse for anyone who doesn't keep every single one of the laws that are written down in the book of God's laws. And that curse is powerful and it's looming and it's just out there. It has to go somewhere, it has to be resolved. It can't just dissipate into the air. Somebody's gonna have to take that thing. And that curse is either gonna fall upon all the people who've ever violated any single part of the law, which is everybody, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, or it's gonna have to get absorbed, eaten by somebody who can pull that off. And it turns out the only one who can pull that off is Jesus, or the suffering servant we've been reading about in Isaiah 53, who's the one the prophet said is gonna take all of our infirmities and carry our sorrows and be pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. And the punishment that brought us peace was upon him and by his wounds were healed, and the one upon whom the Lord will lay the iniquity of us all, the one whose life is gonna be poured out unto death, the one who's gonna be numbered among the transgressors, for he's gonna bear the sin of many and make intercession for the transgressors. That guy, described hundreds of years before the book of Galatians by the prophet Isaiah, is Jesus, and he's the only one who's positioned like the Hulk with the glove to absorb the curse. And that is what Galatians chapter three is all about. It's Paul saying that right standing with God, avoiding the consequences of the curse, cannot happen through exemplary behavior or perfect adherence to the law or some extended version of the law. Nobody can do it. It's not going to work, it is not an avenue ultimately to life. Rather, we're going to need a curse absorber. And then Paul masterfully weaves a whole bunch of Old Testament scripture that we've gone and looked at over the course of just a few verses here in Galatians 3 to point out that this curse is real, to point out that this curse is on everyone, to further lean into the curse language to say, cursed is anyone who's hung on a tree. And that's all meant to point people back to Jesus, the suffering servant. He took the curse for us. He did the thing that nobody else could do. He absorbed the curse. Galatians 3 14, he, Jesus, redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit. There is a tremendous expenditure of power in Jesus absorbing that curse. It is such a significant deal that it changes everything about where we're at in history and how people are with God, with huge implications for the social orders and structures and what we do with our lives and all kinds of things. And so it's understandable that it would take a minute for people to sort all of that through and think through what the implications of this curse absorption are. And that's really where Paul is taking us as readers and the Galatian church as well as he pushes forward into Galatians chapter three, and we'll work on that more next time around. Hey, a long time ago, I told you that Patreon, the primary website that we use to make it possible for some of you to support the program. Thank you for that, by the way. It means a tremendous amount. You don't have to do it, but I'm always grateful. I told you a while back that Patreon had forced changes on us. They didn't want a weekly thing anymore, where 52 times a year I quote unquote charge the patrons a couple bucks or whatever you're signed up for for that week. They really wanted it to go to monthly. And they had this whole system for how they do it. It took them a long time to finally get that done, but they have now done that. They have ported, based on their calculations, the Patreon support for each one of you from a weekly number that could be projected out 52 times over the course of the year to a monthly number that could be projected out 12 times a year. So now, what's going to happen over at Patreon is I'm still going to use that all the time for our discussion threads. You don't even have to be a paid supporting member or anything like that. You can jump in for free if you want. I just want everybody to be a part of the conversation. And for those of you who want to support the program for a little while, for a long time, for whatever, please know that Patreon has made that change. They've adjusted your number from a weekly number to a monthly number. It should all add up, right? It looks about right to me on my end, but please go check that. And any of you who should choose to sign up to support the program through Patreon, the number you see on there is the number that you are kicking in to help make this thing go every month. It's been a huge hassle and a giant point of stress for me. I'm so glad it's done. My family, I mean, this is how we live. So yeah, I've been on kind of pins and needles about that, and I'm grateful that it is more or less worked out okay on our end, but I'm sorry for the headache for you and glad that that's finally in the rearview mirror. Thank you so much to all of you who support this thing. Also, thank you to all of you who don't. You don't have to do that at all. I'm just glad that we're here. I'm glad that we get to do this together. And I've missed you. Nice to be back. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.