You're listening to the Ten Minute Bible Member podcast. It's Fast Unfree Daily Deep Dive Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_01We're looking at this pivotal moment in the middle of the book of Galatians, where Paul, the author of the Book of Galatians, is building out his argument and he's trying to lay the groundwork for why the whole proposition of how the bad guys in the book of Galatians are coming at salvation and right standing for God, with God, that is, he's trying to build out the case for why their whole approach is just wrongheaded. Their whole approach demonstrates a misunderstanding of the good work of God and the character of God and the plan of God, and particularly it demonstrates a wrong-headed understanding of why God gave the law in the first place, way back in the Old Testament. And to the uncritical reader, or on your first pass, casually, on my first pass, casually, it could look like, oh, Paul's picking a fight here. He's saying there's a fight between the Old Testament God and what God did back there with the law and the New Testament God and what God is doing now through the work of Christ on the cross and with the Holy Spirit. But a closer look reveals no, he's not setting these two things against each other. What he's saying here is, and this is an analogy we haven't used yet in our conversation on Galatians, but it's one that I like to use a lot when we're talking about Jesus and the book of Matthew and the kingdom stuff. It's a question of currency. So one time a while back, I went on a trip to Europe and I had some huge euro note left over. I don't even remember why I had it. Usually I want to cash that stuff out because it's valuable. But let me tell you what, it's not valuable here where I live in South Dakota. Nobody cares about your stupid Euros. So I had a big giant thing of Euros. It'd just been in my pocket from jeans. I probably sometimes wear jeans a few too many days in a row, and I still had my jeans from the trip a couple days earlier, and I still had these Euros in my pocket. Somebody's credit card machine was down at a place where I had ordered some food and it was like 10 bucks. But I had like a hundred bucks a Euros or something crazy like that. I knew it was a long shot. I didn't have any USD. And so I asked these nice people, these local business owners who are wonderful, like, can I give you this? Do you ever travel or would your bank swap it later? It's worth so much more than what the cost of this actual little quick lunch was. But your credit card machine's not working. I don't have any cash. This seems like maybe a good compromise. And they were so nice about it. But they're like, no, hard pass. No, we don't want your communist European money. That's their words, not mine. And it's a paraphrase of their words, not mine, nor their actual words. They didn't actually intone anything like that. They just didn't want European money. They didn't care how much European money it was. They didn't care that it was like a five to one or ten to one ratio of what they were actually owed. It's a pain in the butt. It has no power here. It has no currency here. It's useless. It's just printed paper. No, we trust you. You come here a lot, just come back with money later. And I did, and everything was fine. The point is a bunch of people might get together and say, this currency is valuable. We say it is, and we all say it with lots of intensity, and we have lots of meetings about it, and there are publications about it, and many smart people gathered together and discuss it. Yeah, but try taking that crap on the road. If you take it somewhere else, somebody's like, it just it doesn't matter how obsessed you are with this or how much you all gawk over it and pursue it. It doesn't matter. And it's just wrong headed to bring that currency out here and act like it's going to do something, flash it around, and nobody cares about your dumb currency from somewhere else. It doesn't mean anything here. Likewise, I really feel like the heart of the argument that Paul is making here is that we're dealing in two different currencies. The currency of the law is something that buys and sells and trades in something else. It doesn't trade in salvation and ultimate right standing with God. It trades in an ethnic national standing with God, and it involves some civil stuff on a larger level, and it it's some kind of stopgap that points to something that happens later. I'm not getting all the way into the weeds here because it's going to get spelled out more explicitly as we get further into Galatians. Our conversation will take us there. But it seems like Paul's argument is you're trying to buy something with a currency that doesn't work on this, or to put it way more simply, salvation, ultimate right standing with God, being a Christian, whatever language you want to use, is an exercise in faith. That is the only currency that buys it, and the only source of all of that, of everything in this economy, is God Himself. All of the ebb and flow and circulation of this currency and these values in his kingdom are his. He bought and paid for them all, they're all his, his to distribute, his to use, he's in charge of everything, all of his judgments are right. The currency of the Old Testament law is doing stuff. Now, there's a faith element involved, and it would be nonsensical to say that there is not. And if we read a lot more of Paul throughout the New Testament, we see that he's not suggesting that faith didn't exist in the Old Testament. Well, of course it did. And I think as we read more of Paul as well, we would never get the impression that he believed that there was any possibility or any belief that anyone could truly uphold all of the law. I mean, Paul was aware of the sacrificial system. Why did the sacrificial system exist in the Old Testament? Well, it was to fix stuff that people did wrong. So everybody knew that nobody could really uphold the law. And maybe I could be accused of inadvertently strawmanning the point here just a little bit over the last few days of our conversation. I haven't meant to, I don't think I am, but the point being this pretty much nobody was out there credibly saying at any point, I pretty I think we can pretty much uphold every last bit of the law. And then Paul came along and was like, Yeah, but what about Deuteronomy 27, 26? And then they were like, ah, dang it, that's right. That part. Rather, what Paul is doing is I think he's trying to push back and with their own assumptions, that is the agitators who were messing with the Galatians and opposed to the actual gospel. I think he's trying to say, like, with your own assumptions and your own behavior and with the very law you are advocating for, all of your actions and all of your words indicate that you know it's the wrong currency for ultimately having right standing with God. It isn't the ultimate and complete solution to the problem of sin and depravity and the failure of humankind and the human problem in general. If it were, why hasn't it worked yet? And Paul goes so far as to use the language that the law comes with a curse. What is that curse? Well, a big part of the curse is that it isn't faith. So it might be really valuable in another context. If you're listening in Europe, you can just flip these if you want to. But if you're listening to the United States, it might be that Euros are super valuable somewhere else. They just don't do a lot of stuff here. And obviously that metaphor breaks down because there's such a thing as currency exchanges and everything, but I think you understand what I'm driving at. Point being, Paul is making a very nuanced argument with inside baseball, using insider language with a whole bunch of people who are deep in the weeds with him in the whole history of the law and all of that. But the thrust of what he's saying is, guys, look at everything you say and believe in what the law itself says. Your proposal for how to have right standing with God is wrongheaded from the start. You're coming at it wrong. You're trading in the wrong currency. This thing here is entirely a faith currency. You must trade in that currency. It's the only thing that buys anything in this kingdom, in this realm, and it's all owned by God. I don't think Paul is washing his hands of everybody who was on earth before Jesus. I don't think Paul is saying that there was no forgiveness or no squaring up accounts with God. I don't think Paul is washing his hands of all of the work of God with his people in the past. I think he's using very nuanced, very insider language to say you're coming at this the wrong way. Guys, the righteous will live by faith. Life is the thing we're talking about. Faith is the currency of such a pursuit, and it's been that way since forever. And so of all things, he grabs a quote from Habakkuk two and verse four. We're talking about the Chaldeans, or I mean it's the Chaldeans just means the Babylonians, the people who were going to come a few years after Habakkuk was written and conquer the Jewish people, destroy the temple under Nebuchadnezzar. And there's a dialogue, as we talked about yesterday, going on between Habakkuk, who's kind of indignant about how God's coming at this, and God, who is pretty comfortable in his own skin and more than content to answer Habakkuk's questions. And Habakkuk's second question to God is why are you using people who are even worse than the people of Judah to punish the people of Judah? They're awful. And God's answer is more or less, yeah, yeah, they're bad. They'll get theirs, and I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do to make the point that I'm gonna make, give it time. What a massive paraphrase of something much more beautiful and complex than what I just said. Go read Habakkuk, it's only three chapters, you'll understand it better if you just see what's in there in the first place. But in the midst of this, we're talking about the Chaldeans, and it says, see, he is puffed up, his desires are not upright, but the righteous will live by faith. And it goes on. Indeed, wine betrays him, he's arrogant and never at rest, because he's as greedy as the grave and like death is never satisfied, he gathers to himself all the nations and takes captive all the people. This is an interesting side note. A lot of this language right here is very similar to some of the language that later Herodotus, the Greek historian, would latch onto and put in the words, put in the mouths rather, of some of the enemies who stood up to Persia and defied them a little bit later on. I think that's one of the reasons I think maybe Herodotus had a little bit of awareness of Hebrew scripture, because uh I see hints of this language in him. The point is this God is saying to Habakkuk, yeah, I mean, the Chaldeans are a mess, but you know, pat on the head, hey, the righteous will live by faith. My guess would be that that was uh phrase that was of great consolation to the people while they were in exile. I bet that phrase got repeated a whole lot. I bet it's one of the five or ten things from the pre-exile part of the Old Testament that the exiles in captivity in Babylon and Persia would tell themselves, be like, hey, we might not have the most stuff right now. We might not be in the best moment, and it might seem like our captors are just living it up and drunk and having fun and all the possessions and all the power, but the righteous will live by faith. It's a beautiful little aside of consolation right there. And I wonder if Paul is hearkening back to something that carried even extra meaning here for the people he was interacting with, and maybe some of that significance of that phrase or just the commonality of the use of that phrase as a reassurance is maybe passed into history for you and me, whether that's how it was employed or not. He picked that phrase from the Old Testament. The Old Testament is Bible, it's fair game, and it's right out of the mouth of God. Maybe that's a big reason that he latched onto it, is it's straight from the mouth of God. The righteous will live by faith. That's God himself in the midst of difficult times, saying, There's the currency, there's the thing. So look, Galatians chapter three, it's intense. I mean, this is intense language, this is a three-way conversation. Two parties in the conversation who are at odds are a former Jewish guy, or one, a guy who's the Jew of Jews, ultra trained in all of this and a follower of Christ, and others who are maybe masquerading as Christians or not fully Christians, or maybe Christians who just totally don't get it. I don't know, they're agitators, but they're rooted in the Old Testament and Judaism as well. And then this poor third party are the people who are getting pulled back and forth, and they received the right message before, but then they got tricked and they kind of fell for it. Now they're embarrassed, but they want to get it right, and this is hard, and they're just reading Paul's letter, and we're gonna try to get it right from here on out. Bottom line, in the midst of this very challenging stuff, and remember, Peter himself in one of his letters says Paul's stuff can be really challenging. It's hard, it can be difficult to understand. That's more or less how he says it. This is challenging stuff, but at the heart of it, I think very clearly is Paul saying it is fundamentally wrong headed to imagine that right standing with God is ultimately a product of the currency of doing. Right standing with God is ultimately rather a product of the currency of faith. The righteous will live by faith. Guys, God said so himself. The righteous will live by faith. Now, this next chunk, we're gonna have to take a handful of verses at once because we just can't break it down verse by verse, or it'll become too confusing, and that's what we'll do next time around. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again, sir.