You ever stop and think about the hierarchy of fast food? When I was a kid, we only went to the super, super lowest rung fast food places. And so I imagined that there were only two in the stations in the hierarchy of fast food. You had original hamburger stand and McDonald's, like old school cheapo McDonald's. Now they're trying to be a little more upscale. And then you had everything else. It was more fancy and more expensive, and we do not tread there. But now that I'm an adult and I waste money on fast food from time to time, I've kind of got this hierarchy in my head. I'm like, you know what? Dang it, there's some pretty nice fast food places. You go there, it's a little bit fancier, you know, the way you sit down, maybe you get a little number or something like that. Maybe somebody else cleans up the table. That's an indicator of something a little bit nicer. But there's definitely bottom rung stuff as well. And I was debating my wife and kids the other day as to where culverts fits into the hierarchy of fast food. Do you have culverse where you're at? It occurs to me that might not be an everywhere thing. It might be an upper Midwest kind of thing. I think of it as a Wisconsin joint that is kind of leaked out to everybody else. Culver's has a blue and white theme. They do frozen custard, and they're like kind of a smash burger kind of style of old-fashioned. They call them butter burgers. I do not like that name. But they do a really good job. High emphasis on the old-timey values and treating people well. I I like culver's. I think it's great. But I think it was culverse, where at one point we got some tokens where you can take them, you can turn them in if you get a kid's meal and you get you turn in a little sheet of paper and they give you frozen custard at the end of your meal there. That's pretty cool. And again, I think, I think it was culverse. But there was a little note on the bottom of it that one of my kids was reading to me and said, Redeem this token for the free ice cream or frozen custard at the end of your meal. And they've been to church a lot because we're you know, we go to church a lot. And one of them was asking me, Why does it say redeemed? You know, because they're thinking Jesus and the cross and all of that stuff. I was like, Oh wow, what a brilliant question. What a wonderful moment. And again, I think it was at Culver's, but at some fast food restaurant like that, I was explaining to them that redeemed it really means that you you buy a thing back or it gets bought back. And the idea in the Bible is that we were owned by someone or something else in our state of sin, and that then we were bought back from that. Now there's all kinds of different historical theological theories of what exactly happened on the cross, what are all the implications of that, and I think they're all more or less born out of the Bible, and one of those theories of what Jesus did on the cross is drawn in part from the verse we're going to look at today in Galatians chapter three that uses that word, redeemed, the idea that there's a buyback going on here, that you were kind of owned by something else, and then Jesus came along and went to the cross and bought you back from it. Now, like I said yesterday, we're in the middle of pretty intense material here in Galatians 3. I just got to tell you, as a side note, I have been tickled over the last however many years we've been doing this together and over all of these seasons with how well this format lends itself to just chipping away at the Bible together. There's no rush. But it's been difficult for me here in the last couple chapters of Galatians, because I feel like I need to reset the entire book every time, because I don't want somebody to just drop in here and hear one episode and get one little sliver of this thing when we're dealing with like the most important stuff in the whole Bible about the fate of your eternal soul and right standing with God, and then the human impulse to go and try to achieve that with good works and merit, like we buy everything else, versus faith in God and just receiving the gift of Christ. And so it's this is it's challenging to break this down in a little 10-minute chunks. Maybe you've noticed it's been more like 12 or 13-minute chunks. I do my best, whatever. So we're talking about redemption today, but this redemption stuff is happening in the middle of very complex language from Paul in Galatians chapter 3. I'm going to bounce back just a little bit and I'm going to read this whole chunk. Ready? Here we go. Does God give you his spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law or because you believe what you heard? Consider Abraham. He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Understand then that those who believe are children of Abraham. The scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announce the gospel in advance to Abraham. Quote, all nations will be blessed through you, unquote. So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. But all who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it's written, cursed is everyone who doesn't continue to do everything written in the book of the law. Clearly, no one is justified before God by the law, because, quote, the righteous will live by faith, unquote. This is new material for us starting right now, Galatians 3 12. The law is not based on faith. On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them. And we'll go dig into that quote down the road here ways as well. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree. He 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. Like I said, the format adds a degree of challenge here when we're dealing with really thick theology all packed into one passage like this, because there's a huge payoff that just happened there. And isn't it wild to hear the whole thing after our conversations, if indeed you have been here for all of our conversations, to hear that whole passage together? It starts with Abraham, the man of faith, and then it takes us on a little journey through the middle, and then it ends with Abraham, the man of faith. And the idea is to the person who's hearing this that if you want to have what Abraham had, which was relationship with God, right standing before God, faith is the currency, faith is the avenue. How does this faith work? Where does it come from? How do you get it? Well, not from doing stuff. It's counterintuitive. It's the gift of God. Who bought the gift? Jesus. Because it says the law is not based on faith. On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it's written curse is everyone who's hung on a tree. This, then, I think, is the point. Everybody's sinful, maybe we wouldn't know, but God reveals his character and his expectations through the law. Then when any reasonable human looks at that, you realize, well, uh-oh, I have a problem. I am not God. I do not live up to the righteous standards of God, and I might be able to do the sacrifices that are provided for and allowed and described in the law, but that doesn't fix the fact that I still have this sinful nature. I got a real problem here. But then along comes Jesus and he pays the price, the penalty for sin and failure and the human problem and the whole mess and all of it. And then after that, anybody who has faith in Christ is redeemed by Christ and is now liberated, no longer a slave to sin and death and failure and all of that stuff, but is now free in Christ, alive in Christ, no longer separated from Christ, separated from God, but bought back and united to him in faith. So when my kids came to me and they're like, what is this? Like you can redeem this token for the ice cream? Yeah, I mean, I guess you could phrase it this way. They're gonna buy that token of debt that they have to you that they gave you on that little sheet of paper. They're gonna buy that back from you with ice cream, satisfied now. Obviously, that's a very gentle, childlike notion of what redemption is, but the heart of it is there. Next time around, we'll look at a little grittier notion of the idea of being bought back out of slavery, being bought back out of a horrible fate of certain death from an example that exists earlier on in the Bible. Simply put, super basic, there is a huge problem that people way back in the day had, that you and I have. Everybody has it. It's the human problem. It is sin, it is shortcoming, it is failure before God. Everybody has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The law points it out and just removes any excuse. In case we might have thought that we were doing okay, it reveals the character of God, the expectations of God, and within the law there are provisions for trying to square up accounts in the meantime, but it doesn't fix the fallen nature of humanity, which is at the heart of our division, our separation from God. Enter Jesus, he goes to the cross, he takes on that whole curse for us, for fallen humanity, pays the price, and redeems us, buys us back from that cruel master, that owner that is sin and death and the evil one. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. How did he do it? He did it by becoming a curse for us, because it's written curse is everyone who's hung on a tree. More on that in a little bit. So, number one, there was a problem. Number two, Christ did this redemptive work. All that's left is number three, faith in Christ regarding what he did there is how we become a part of that redemption that he paid for, that he did the work for. We weren't fit to go and be on that tree ourselves. We're just some guy, we're just some lady, we're not a suitable sacrifice, we're not qualified to do what Christ did on that tree, on that cross. But he was exclusively the only one, and he did it, and it was very efficacious according to Paul, and through faith, the effectiveness of that redemption is made available to Jew and Gentile alike. Pretty big deal. This might be one of those places where breaking it down to too much of an incremental level maybe actually makes this more difficult than it needs to be, and backing out to this slightly wider view that we took today causes us to see the pattern here. Abraham is a man of faith. Let's look at him as an example. Here are some things that don't work and don't follow the example of Abraham. We have a problem, but along comes Christ, and through Christ there is redemption. And just like Abraham, God redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might also come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit. This is wonderful news. The text does not hold this out as being controversial. This is the gospel, this is the good news, this is the great stuff, and we're gonna dig deeper into that over the next couple of days. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.