The longer we do this, the more I feel like an old man who tells you stories that I've already told you before, and generally the story sounds, I hope, the same as the last time I told you, but I don't know, time passes, memories fade. I think I'm getting this story right. A few years ago, my son and one of his buddies were goofing around at our house, you know, just having fun being boys, no problem at all. My wife and one of her friends had recently just done a bunch of spring planting in these flower pots. And they went up to the store and they picked out the flower pots to fit the space, and they did this whole color analysis to make it just look the right way with the color of the house and the season, and they spent all day out there getting their hands dirty and making these you know beautiful flower pots. It was absolutely lovely. Well, then my son and his little buddy were just running around doing boy things, but they weren't being real thoughtful, and they way overswung the screen door, like the kind of thing that for the dads out there just makes you absolutely cringe, like, ah, why why would you do that? It's not how those doors are supposed to work, that's not normal use. Don't yank on that like that. It's not stress tested for that kind of thing. And sure enough, they yanked it way beyond the range of its hinges, damaged the door a little bit, nothing that couldn't be fixed. But in doing so, they knocked the biggest and the most beautiful of these planters off of the porch and broke it and destroyed it. It was a great big mess. My wife's positioning, by the way, of the planter was flawless. There was no reason for her to believe that anyone would ever yank that door that far beyond its specification or factory established range. She read everything right, she's guilt-free in this. The boys just made a mistake. Okay, well, you cool. Opportunity to learn, right? So all the stuff is broken, it's laying there on the ground. I call him over, and we had this great talk about how difficult beauty is. Beauty is hard. This took a ton of work to make this beautiful thing. Wrecking things is easy. It takes only a moment of thoughtlessness to destroy something that it took a ton of effort to make beautiful. But there's this other thing that we can do as well, and that is called redemption. It is also hard and laborious, but it's a beautiful process by which we take things that were beautiful and got wrecked and make them beautiful again. And likewise, that is one of the central themes of the Bible. God made creation, he made people in his own image, the crown jewel of his creation. And he looked at the whole thing and he was like, huh, that's good. He called his work good. And then if you know the story from the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis, sin enters the equation and it wrecks stuff. And there's still goodness and beauty to be found in all of it, because God hasn't abandoned it all. His presence is still there. It was still made by God, but it's twisted up, it's perverted by sin and failure and wickedness and ugliness and death. And then there's this brief moment of tension early in the book of Genesis, where as a reader, for the first time, you're like, Well, will God just quit? Is he out? Is he done? Well, I mean, he could just make a new heavens and a new earth and just start over. He could just make it so it's like this whole thing never happened. He could even ordain that no celestial being ever even remember that this failed build of existence happened and then broke. But no, immediately you figure out, oh no, he's gonna redeem it. He's gonna fix it. He's going to lovingly and carefully, over time, scoop back up all of that scattered dirt. He's going to mend the pot that was broken, and he's going to put the flowers back in there and nurture them back into something beautiful. And as you read along further, you kind of get the impression that the story of it was beautiful, it broke, and then it got redeemed is even more glorifying to God and more demonstrative of his character and his goodness than if the story had just been he made something awesome and then there it was and nothing ever happened. Redemption is hard, redemption is expensive, redemption is at the heart of the character and the impulses and the work of God. And so we get this word redeemed in Galatians 3 13. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. Now the first half of that sentence is beautiful, right? I mean, that's kind of stuff that you're into. That's why you show up if you're a Christian, you eventually figure out that I am like the pot that has been knocked off of the porch. There is a brokenness here. I do not, as a broken pot, have the ability to reassemble myself and put the flowers back in there all neatly arranged. I have to have outside help. I just cannot do this thing. And you realize I cannot redeem myself. I need a redeemer. And then you read the Bible, you encounter God. However it happens for you, you're like, oh, dang, redemption comes from God. It is the gift of God through Christ Jesus, not by anything that I do, but by faith in Christ. And it changes your world. It changes everything. It is the most incredible thing ever. So we're gonna love verses in the Bible where it's about redemption. Because if you're not moved by that story, you're probably not a Christian. I don't even know what's wrong with you. That is the coolest thing of the coolest things. And then you get to the second half of Galatians 3.13, you're like, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. Yay! By becoming a curse for us. Wait, Christ became a curse? Wait, what is that? How does that exactly work? And we're just gonna have to come back to that in a future conversation because that raises a lot of questions. But the first half of that verse is just universally rad. If you're into the things of God or being a Christian, or even if you're just thinking about it, it's great, this concept of redemption. And if you've been around the Bible for a while, there is one book that anytime you hear the word redemption or the hear the idea discussed in the Bible of being bought back from being a slave to something, a slave to sin, a slave to your own mistakes, whatever it is. This one book, which is a little book in the Old Testament, is the thing that eventually springs to mind. This is the redemption book, and it's the book of Hosea. Now, okay, where's Hosea? Well, I got a trick for remembering these things. Remember, you got all the major prophets in the Old Testament. That's like the halfway mark of the Bible. If you just turn to the halfway mark, it's going to be about where the big major prophets of the Old Testament start, Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel, all that. But then right before the New Testament, there's a bunch of teeny tiny little quick hitter books. These are called the minor prophets, not because they didn't do anything useful, but because the minor prophets are just shorter. The books are way shorter. And it's real easy, even for somebody who's been around the Bible for a long time, to have all of that mentally run together and to forget what order they go in and to fumble around for a real long time awkwardly. So I've got my own little mental acrostic for everything that happens after the major prophet of Daniel, all the way to the end of the Old Testament. It's three little phrases. Homer jousts angry otters. That's Hosea, Joel, Amos Obadiah. Jonah, might navigate happily, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zebras, Hurdle, Zamboni Machines, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. You might be like, how do those two Z ones at the end, like, how do you remember which one's Zephaniah and Zechariah, with your little zebras, hurdle, zamboni machines thing? It doesn't seem like that really differentiates between the two. And to that I would say, hey, shut up. So we go to the book of Hosea, which is the first of the minor prophets. And what we see here is there's a narrative. You think of the prophets, and you think, oh, well, these aren't really narrative, they're oracles or whatever, where God's like, Tell the people of Israel that I pronounce three curses upon them for the following reasons. And then the prophet's like, here are the curses. But Hosea's got a little story to it, and the prophet himself plays a role in the story. Interesting. Hosea was a prophet in the late 700s BC in the northern kingdom of Israel. Pretty much all the prophets in the Old Testament are talking to the southern kingdom of Judah, or they are happening after the northern and southern kingdoms fall, and they're talking to the Jewish people after they get taken into captivity and they're functioning as a captive people group in Babylon or Persia. So that's a five hundreds or four hundreds BC. So it's pretty rare to come across a prophet who's talking to the northern kingdom of Israel. Only Jonah, Amos, and Hosea speak to them. As you might expect, all three of these prophets are pretty negative about the northern kingdom because the northern kingdom is a dumpster fire all the time. They don't really have any good kings. Everybody up there does a ratty job. I mean, this is kind of an apostate group up north. It looks like there are little vestiges or hints of remembrance of the things of God and the covenant that God made with Abraham and Moses, the covenant to bless these people and also that they would one day be a blessing to all the nations. So maybe a little bit of remembrance. But for the most part, the kings all seem to forget, and the northern kingdom is a mess. And it's the first to go. In 722 BC, the Assyrians come along and conquer their capital city, and that's it. That's the end of the Northern Kingdom altogether. So Hosea is speaking right at the end of that as things are falling apart or as things are about to completely fall apart. But like I said a minute ago, he is a character in his own book of prophecy, and he gets to play a really unfortunate role in this whole story as sort of an object lesson with his own life. And it's a very painful object lesson, but it is a dramatic story of redemption in the most literal sense that plays out in the book of Hosea, much like the beautiful flower pot that gets knocked off the porch and broken, and then a lot of energy has to go back into putting it back together and redeeming and restoring it. There's imagery here about God's faithfulness and how redemption works. And due to the nature of the passage of time, we're going to unpack what that imagery is and how the story of the book of Hosea goes tomorrow. But the bottom line is redemption is not some new concept that Paul is just bringing up willy-nilly in Galatians chapter three. It is a beloved, cherished concept that runs through the entire Old Testament and New Testament. But everybody Paul was talking to would have had this notion of, you know, some visual image in their own brains, a little different than mine, but it'd be right there, of some kind of beautiful thing, being wrecked, but God having these promises outstanding to say, if you turn back to me, I will remember you and I will restore your thing and I will make it beautiful again. And Hosea is one of the books that really tells that story. So we'll look at the details of that in support of Galatians chapter three. Manyana. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.