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Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Never Podcast, and I am a rule breaker. I am a person who has been grounded. I am an offender. I've been disciplined and corrected for that. When I was in high school, I actually got grounded quite a bit for breaking a curfew. That's always what I got in trouble for. But one time I remember I thought I had a pretty valid plea for why it shouldn't be my fault. I went into town with my friends. We weren't doing anything naughty. We were all pretty well behaved. And we were just cruising and listening to music and having a good time. But because we were cruising, we I dropped my car off. And I was in somebody else's car and was kind of at their mercy. And I told them, I need you got to drop me off in my car again now because I got to go home and it's a little bit of a drive home, and I can't be late because I always get grounded when I'm late. My parents are really serious about the curfew thing. And they blew me off. They didn't drop me off at the car, and we were a long ways from my car. And as a result, when they finally got around and being like, okay, fine, I'll take you. I was way late getting home. There were no cell phones back then. My parents were very angry, and I got grounded. I, of course, made the plea, it's not my fault because I asked to get taken back to my car. There's nothing I could do. It was out of my control. Somebody else did this to me. And my parents did not accept that. Well, what do you make of that? You think I have a point there? Is it a valid defense on my part? Who is to blame for my lateness, my breaking of the household rules? Well, my parents' case was they're like, hey, it's up to you to manage your night. You know what our expectation is. We give you a lot of freedom to go and do things and have fun, but you have to manage the situation so that you can live up to our expectations, and you didn't manage the situation, so you're responsible for it. However, you got into it, you're responsible for it. Okay. That might sound harsh, but looking back on it, to me, I think I actually side with them and not teenage me. I think they were right. Well, we got another question like that that we've been working over here in the first two chapters and change of the book of Galatians. The question is one of culpability. Whose fault is it here that the Galatian Christians who initially heard the message of Jesus and believed in Jesus and received the Holy Spirit, but then got suckered into believing a different version of the gospel that was all about them and human effort? Whose fault is it that this situation has arisen? Is it the fault of the Galatians who wandered from the truth and were dumb enough to listen to fake competing versions of the gospel? Or is it the fault of the people who inflicted that upon them? Now we went and looked at a bunch of voices from church history to feel that out from a bunch of different angles. And I think pretty much everybody who we looked at, St. John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Saint Jerome, and they all more or less said the same thing. There's culpability sufficient to go around. Everybody has a hand in this. The Judaizers, the agitators, the bad guys in the book of Galatians, they certainly have culpability in this because they went out of their way to screw up this church that had been going great until they came along. And then obviously the Galatians are held out in the book as being wrong. Paul very directly, not just tonally, but explicitly, is saying, you guys are wrong. Paul pins it on both parties. Think about Galatians 1. He opens it up, he's like, hey, I'm Paul, and this I'm from God, not by men or by man, and also grace and peace to all of you. It's like he just like just, okay, these are the greetings. We got to do it. It's very important. There's a reason we do this first, but let me just get to the next part. And then he gets to that. He's like, you know, glory to God forever and ever. Amen. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ to returning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. So he immediately tears into the Galatians for believing the fake gospel. And so somebody might be like, aha, well, there's your culpability right there. Whoever yelled at first, that's whose fault it is. But he does go on to immediately yell at the other party, or at least you know, from a distance, he says, evidently some people are throwing you into confusion or are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. Oh, okay, so within really two sentences, wait, no, that's a long hyphen. Within one sentence of getting into the meat of what he has to say, the occasion of the letter to the Galatian church, if you will, within one sentence, Paul has made it really clear what you guys got wrong is different, you two parties, but you both got things wrong, and we're in this mess because of both of you. Now, when I would get in trouble with my parents, and really the thing I always got in trouble for was lateness. We lived like 20 minutes away from the town where my high school was, and I could not defeat that mentally. The math in my brain was like, if I have to be home at 10 o'clock, then I should leave here at 10 o'clock. I know it's 20 minutes away, though. I don't uh my parents were as mystified as you are right now, simple math, a teenage brain. What are you gonna do? But when I would get in trouble with my parents, the thing they really wanted for me was not to figure out who was the blame for why I was late this time or what my elaborate story would be. What they wanted to get to the heart of is why are you getting this wrong? And what would it look like to get it right? And they would try all of these different gentle, sometimes more forceful, sometimes with very direct language, sometime with sometimes with very uh caring language, nurturing language. They would try all these different angles and approaches to be like, all right, this thing is wrong, it's unacceptable, you have culpability for that, even if other people helped you in this, even if other people bear some guilt too. I'm not talking to them, son, I'm talking to you. They would quickly get past that though, and get into how do we get it right? It's diagnose the real problem here and get to what went right. And I think that's the tone Paul has taken through this whole letter. So it's almost like I'm asking the wrong question by bringing this up and being like, well, you know, whose fault is it here? Well, it seems like there's plenty of blame to go around, but overwhelmingly, Paul in this letter is talking to the Galatians. So overwhelmingly, he's dealing with what they got wrong. The same way that my dad, when I was late getting home or broke curfew, he wouldn't get mad at Jeremy or Aaron or Michelle or anybody else. Like they're not here. I'm not their parent. You're here, and I'm gonna talk with you about what you got wrong. That makes sense. That's good parenting. It's the right way to handle the problem and keep a kid who is in a position where they want to deflect from deflecting. So, yeah, the Judaizers, they come up in Galatians. It's like they're kind of being addressed a little bit secondarily, like when passive aggressive people don't like your parenting. Sometimes you know how they'll come up to you and they'll be like, oh, hey, look at this little family. Hey, little guy, did mommy and daddy not dress you warm enough? Oh, you should tell them to dress you warmer so you don't catch a cold. I'm right here. If you have concerns, you can address them with me. I'm an adult, I speak English, I'm right. I see what you're doing, I hate it. It's that that kind of thing, except I think Paul comes off a little bit better as he secondarily addresses the people who contributed to getting this wrong. And really what we're seeing in the book of Galatians is pretty consistent with what we see in the rest of the Bible. There is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to human failure, sin, the human problem. Some of it is willful. People just want to do it because we're selfish and we write a little narrative for ourselves to be like, ah, there, I deserve this. I'm owed. We always come up, cook up little stories when we want to do something screwed up, and we all have the ability to do it willfully, just bad stuff. But then other times people mean to do something good and they accidentally do something bad because their plan was bad or the execution was bad. Other times, people don't really know that what they were doing was bad and they were just kind of floating along, but they realize later, oh no, that was bad, and it was born out of selfishness. Okay. Sometimes things just happen and nobody's really to blame. Sometimes it's collective guilt, kind of everybody getting everything wrong at once. Sometimes it's people from a weak position where they wield no power, still being selfish and sinful. Other times it's people from a position of power doing selfish, sinful things. All those categories seem to break in the face of the question of sin and culpability. But there is this tone also throughout the whole Bible, as we're seeing also here in Galatians, that is very parental, that is very nurturing, that is very quick to get past the okay, there's a lot of guilt here to go around, and very quick to get to what went wrong here, and more importantly, what does it look like to get it right? And that is the trajectory of the whole book of Galatians. And Paul sounds real harsh here in Galatians 3 1 when he says, You foolish Galatians! Clearly he thinks they have culpability for what went wrong. Who has bewitched you? Ooh, that language, as we discussed for the last week or so, indicates their culpability, but also somebody else's culpability in this mess. Before your very eyes, oh, we're back to the uh the Galatians now, Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I'd like to learn just one thing from you. Okay, we're still dealing with the Galatians now. We're not talking about the agitators, we're talking about the Galatians. Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law or by believing what you heard? I can just hear my dad's voice here. Matthew, Matthew, Matthew. I'm gonna stop you right there. But are you the one who is late getting home? Or was it Jeremy who was driving the car? Who who's the one who's late though? Who am I talking to? It's me, Dad. Yeah, it's you, and that's what we're gonna focus on here. Paul goes on. Are you so foolish after beginning with the spirit? Are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? He's not talking to the agitators here. He's done with that for the moment. He's dealing with his spiritual children. Have you suffered so much for nothing if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law or because you believe what you heard? Now Paul is making deep eye contact here with his spiritual children. He's not going to hear any of this blame game or any of this stuff about what they're they're very authoritative and okay, cool. Well, Paul will deal with them later, and he does confront them later, in person to their faces. But right now, he's being a spiritual father to his spiritual children, that being the Christians from this fledgling church in Galatia that is speed wobbling and right on the edge of either wiping out horribly or pulling it back together. My dad could see when I was growing up, but my desire to shift the blame for my mistakes bordered on stuff that could be disastrous for me character-wise, and I did want to shift the blame. I still feel that impulse when I do something wrong. It feels way better to have it be somebody else's fault or to blame somebody richer or more powerful. But the reality is I got stuff wrong back then, and I get stuff wrong now. And my dad was right to call it out and try to address this in my character by figuring out not exactly what percentage of blame belongs to each party involved. No, no, no, no, no. Dad would say, I'm not talking to them, I'm talking to you. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna break down how we made the mistake and what getting it right would look like. And then that's the majority of what my dad and my mom would do with me when I made these kind of mistakes, and I'm grateful to them. The only fault that needed to be discussed when I got those things wrong, break and curve few all the time, was my fault. And for the most part, the guilt that needs to be focused on and discussed in the book of Galatians is the Galatians' guilt, their culpability in this situation. Paul isn't being mean to them by that, he's being loving to them. It's his role in their lives. They have invited him into that role, and he's playing that role well, Christians believe, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt, this is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this against the