We got a Bible conundrum here. We're going to try to get to the bottom of it today. We're going to do this in real time together. It seems like at first glance, just at first glance, the book of Galatians might come off as a little bit down on the Old Testament law of God. But then you flip over to the Old Testament, and it is very up, very high on the law. I mean, it's super pro-law. It celebrates the law at every turn. It's from God. You should obey it. If you do, you'll get blessed. If you don't, you'll get cursed. Also, you should meditate on it all the time. This is how you know God and understand his character. You should make jewelry out of the law and wear it on your head. You should make house decorations out of the law and stick it on your doorposts. You should make songs and poems out of the law. You should pass it along to your kids. So what gives? What changed? What's going on here? What might we be missing based on this tonal change regarding the law from the Old Testament to the New Testament? Well, here's an example in Galatians 3.10 of Paul, a Jew, a former practitioner of Judaism and a former rejecter of Christ and persecutor of Christians. He's the one writing this letter, and he's writing it mostly to people who aren't Jewish, remember, who have recently become Christians themselves, just a few years, maybe a couple decades after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And initially, they just believed in Jesus and the Holy Spirit showed up, and there was miraculous confirmation that, yep, even though you're not Jewish and you don't really know anything about the law, y'all are Christians for sure. You are in the kingdom. But remember, then along came some Jewish people who really liked the Old Testament law, and they went to these Christians in Galatia and they were like, hey, you guys are sort of Christians, but not really, because you're not adhering to the Old Testament law. We're going to show you how to do that. And one of the first steps is adult circumcision. And I like to imagine that at about that moment, somebody as they were starting to line up, and the traveling circumcisor is unrolling his tools and this like kind of velvety little cloth wrap that he has and they're all clinking and glistening and everything. I kind of imagined that maybe somebody as they were getting into line was like, you know what? Would it be cool if we just held off on this for a minute while I fire off a letter to Paul, the guy who brought us Christianity, and just make sure we're doing this right. Seems like a big commitment. Hate to make a mistake on something like this. And so I imagine somebody got a hold of Paul. And then Paul was like, whoa, hold up a second, and he fires off this, frankly, kind of angry, rebuking, corrective letter of Galatians. And in that letter, he says this in Galatians 3.10. All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. Well, now on the one hand, tonally, and maybe I exaggerated a little bit with my voice acting there, but tonally, it seems like this is a guy who doesn't like the law, and he's mad that people who do like the law have come along. But if we look a little bit closer, we discover that Paul probably does like the law because in this very verse he's quoting from the law the phrase, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law, unquote, is from the law. That's in Deuteronomy chapter 21. To be clear, Paul is citing the law as he's talking about what the law is for. So I suppose the most natural thing to do in the world would be to go look at what he's quoting, and it's Deuteronomy 2123. Now, before we even get flipped over here to Deuteronomy 21, 23, I think we can already start to figure out what it is that Paul is saying here. He's saying the law says that you're cursed if you don't keep every single thing in the law. So it seems like the point he's going to go on to make is, can any of you do that? Are any of you doing that? Does anybody keep the whole law? Does anybody in the entire Old Testament keep the whole law? Are there any characters who we see, who we get any kind of reasonable close look at, who got that right? Has anyone ever kept the law? Now if you just read through the whole Old Testament, I think you'd be hard pressed to say anybody actually did. But especially if you listen to the teachings of Christ just a couple decades before the writing of the letter to the Galatian Church, then you definitely can't make the case that anybody has actually ever kept the law because Jesus goes through and he takes it all from the level of external action and takes it to the level of the heart, likening murder and hate. I mean nobody passes this test of obedience to the law that Jesus puts forward. Nobody, nobody, nobody, not Paul, not Moses, not Abraham, nobody, only Jesus. So I think what Paul is driving at, without even listening to anything else he has to say yet, is just to say you can't rely on the law for right standing with God because the law says that if you don't keep all of it, you're cursed, and you can't keep all of it. I know you guys. I met you. Do you remember what happened on that one Wednesday night, guys, in Galatia when we were all there? I'm just making things up. I don't know if there's a Wednesday night thing, but let's just imagine they had a Wednesday night thing and it got a little bit weird. Do you guys remember that Wednesday night downtown? Okay, so literally every one of you, I know firsthand, has not kept the law. What are we doing here, guys? The people who are there yelling at you and throwing you into confusion, sharpening their knives, just eagerly looking forward to the opportunity to get to cutting, they haven't kept the whole law. Nobody has kept the whole law, and the law says that if you don't, you're cursed. Deuteronomy 21, 23. It's written right here. Dang it, I got the wrong reference. That's gonna come up a little bit later on where we're talking about people getting hung on trees and stuff. I know it sounds weird, but it's gonna make sense a couple episodes from now. What is it actually? It's Deuteronomy 27, 26. That makes so much more sense. It looks like this translation has it as cursed is the man who does not uphold the words of this law by carrying them out. Now, a couple notes on this, real quick. One, you probably noticed that isn't identical in the phrasing to how Paul said it. And the reason for that is that Paul was probably quoting from the Septuagint. But a lot of times when the quotes between the New and Old Testament in your modern Bibles don't perfectly match up, it usually means that the English translation of the Old Testament that you have in front of you is drawing on something called the Masoretic text. We can get into all that. I've got videos and stuff about it, and that the New Testament quoter is quoting from the Septuagint, which is an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that was about 250 years old, give or take, at the time that the book of Galatians was being written. I do not know off the top of my head which way that goes here, but anytime you see the phrase turn just a little differently between the Old Testament and the New Testament, that's usually what's going on. But the other and bigger thing for the purpose of our conversation that we got to remember about this Deuteronomy 27, 26 that Paul is quoting in Galatians 3, is that this statement of curse, cursed are you if you don't uphold the words of this law by carrying them all out. This curse is the last thing that gets said in this entire whole reading of the law in the book of Deuteronomy. And the whole book of Deuteronomy is basically just a rereading of the law that we've already seen a little bit earlier in the Old Testament and in Exodus and on into Leviticus, more on what Deuteronomy is and where that all fits tomorrow. So it ends on a pretty negative note, like with a warning. God kind of rattling the saber at his people. If I don't know if that analogy works for the character of God, but I think you know what I mean. Saying, hey, I'm not just giving you all of these laws that took 27 chapters or whatever for me to spell out because I want to say some things. I'm giving you these laws because I expect you to do them. Now, literally, in the next chapter in Deuteronomy, God's talking with Moses about blessings for obedience and reiterating curses for disobedience. So there's, you know, it's carrot and stick here, but the reading of the law to the people concludes with that warning that Paul is drawing on in Galatians chapter three. Here's what I'm getting at. Paul's making two points. Point number one, you can't do this. No one has done it. No one kept that law. And yet this says that everybody who doesn't uphold the law is cursed. So everybody's cursed. What are we going to do about that? That's point number one. Point number two that Paul is making is that he's strategically picking the last thing from the last full big reading of the law that is in the Bible. Now there are other stories in the Old Testament of the law being reread to the assembly. Like, you know, then Joshua got everybody together and they reread the law and they all committed to it. Or then Ezra built a big stage and had everybody come together, whatever this would be, like a 900 years later after Deuteronomy, and they read the law all day long. But it doesn't actually put the law in the text. Deuteronomy is the last time that we get the whole law kind of laid out for us and the last words ringing in our ears when we get done with this very long, very difficult 27 chapters or whatever of reading the law is curse is the man who does not uphold the words of the law by carrying them out. And Paul is drawing on that last phrase, that last clause, because it's one everybody should know. Everybody should remember that that's how the law ends. And then all they should have to do, going back to point one, is just look at their own lives for the lives of people they know, even people they admire and like, and be like, Did do I keep this? Does anybody keep this? Oh dang, we got a problem here, don't we? We're cursed if we don't keep the law, but nobody keeps the law. It's almost as though we need a righteousness that is apart from the law, and that is the gift of God to have any hope of right standing with God at all, which is, of course, the whole point of the book of Galatians. But don't take my word for it. I want to get books of the Bible in my hip pocket. I hope that we are getting books of the Bible in our hip pocket, and we're gonna put in the energy to chase down what Paul is pointing us toward in the larger scriptures to try to really understand what's going on here. Because I don't want to do a thing where you and I get to the end of Galatians and we're like, oh, great. So yeah, the law was just dumb and it doesn't matter to me, and it doesn't matter, and the Old Testament doesn't matter. I don't even know why that's actually still in the Bible. All I really need is Galatians and maybe a couple of verses from Jesus because I get it now. That that's all it is. Well, this whole Bible is here for a reason, and I think it would be smart of us to try to understand how the whole thing hangs together and what the whole thing means and how we encounter the richness and fullness of the character of God through it. So with Paul's help and companionship, we're gonna keep chasing this thing down together, and hopefully, we're gonna come out the other side with a better understanding than we have right now of how the Old Testament and the New Testament hang together and what it is that Paul's talking about here and what the law is and what it did back then and what it does now. More on that, Maan Yana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again, sir.