Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we're doing something fun right now. Let me just reset the whole scene for you here. So if you're just jumping in, you can get what we're doing. We're in the book of Galatians on this podcast. We go pick a book of the Bible and we go through it one little bit per day. And we just chip away as long as it takes. You know, 10-ish minutes of content every day is what I'm shooting for. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. Try to have fun with it. If I don't know things about the text, which is pretty common, then we take as long as it takes to try and go and figure out what we can know about it, or reason it through. Or in this case, what we're doing right now, go see what smarter people have to say about it. So in the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul went and founded this church in the first century A.D. in the very early days of Christianity, or founded a bunch of churches in this Roman region, this province of Galatia. And it looks like there were a bunch of non-Jews who signed up to become Christians, or God miraculously worked in their hearts, would be a better way to put it. They became Christians, and it was going awesome. And then not too much later down the road, some people came up from Jerusalem who were Jewish Christians or maybe just Jewish practitioners who sort of feigned an interest in Christianity, and they're like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. You all have way too much freedom up here. We're going to come up and metaphorically baton you back into not having all of this religious freedom and freedom in Christ that you're celebrating and talking about. No, no, no, no. You got to do all these things that we do. You have to abide by the law of the Old Testament, and you are made right with God. These interlopers came and told them by doing Old Testament things and abiding by even our cultural standards that we've invented over the centuries that are above and beyond even the Old Testament. You got to do all of that because a person gets right standing before God, they said, by stuff they do and by adhering to the law. Well, that isn't what the Galatians signed up for in the first place. That isn't what they believed. That isn't the message they heard. What they heard is that Christ had done the work and that they could receive right standing before God, even as ethnic outsiders to the whole thing. They're not Jews. They could receive right standing before God by the gracious work of Christ, by believing. Well, apparently the Galatian church, a whole bunch of them, believed what these interlopers said. So Paul asked to write this letter to be like, what the heck are you guys doing? What it's not even close. I'm disgusted. I'm dismayed. I'm baffled. I'm bewildered by how you felt for this. Come on. You guys had this like two minutes ago when I was just there. So there's definitely a tone of indignation throughout the book of Galatians. And the first two chapters, it's pretty rebuke-y. There's a lot of inside baseball here. And then Paul at the end of chapter two, he makes this theology statement that I think is his constructive proposal for the Galatians. He's like, here's all the stuff you got wrong. Now this is what it looks like to get it right. And he says, I've been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. And then the rest of the book of Galatians, from the beginning of chapter three on, is Paul fleshing out this idea for them, giving them a vision, reminding them of the vision of what it looks like to be crucified with Christ, to live life by the Spirit, as opposed to fruitlessly trying to live life and pursue justification before God through the law of the Old Testament. And Galatians is a very compelling book even today, because modern readers like me, maybe like you, we come across this, and dang, we're a lot like the Galatians. We're suckers for believing that whatever we get in this life is because we worked hard and we did stuff, including, we might even mistakenly be tempted to believe, right standing before God. That's because I impressed God and I do more nice good things than other people. I give more money, I say slightly fewer swears, I've done less naughty bad things. My college wild phase was a little less wild than other people. The screwed up things about my friendships and my marriage are slightly less screwed up than other people. I made up like 20 rules that are a measure of goodness that I didn't tell anybody else about, but I abide by all of them, and other people don't abide by them as well. Therefore, I'm good. It's very tempting to make the same mistakes the Galatians were making back then, and so Galatians is a very relevant book for understanding the unfolding of the New Testament and the Bible in general, but it's also a very relevant book for understanding the unfolding of our hearts and the rebuking tone that Paul takes toward the Galatians is one that I think it's okay to even hear from time to time and imagine it is, in a sense, directed at us because of that selfish temptation to make all of these things about self and self-effort and minimize or even ignore the fact that this all, any right standing before God, any hope we have, is by the grace of God alone, through the work of Christ alone. So, anyways, there's your reset. What we've been doing the last few days is considering this question, who's at fault here? Were the Galatians who Paul's writing to here just innocent bystanders who got tripped up by interlopers who wanted to hurt them and they didn't do anything wrong? Or did the Galatians have culpability in this thing? And further, Paul uses the word bewitched. And so we've been wondering is are we actually talking like some kind of spell or the devil or something here? Does he just mean you got tricked, you got fooled? Galatians 3:1. You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before your very eyes? Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. So we've been looking at what some Christians from across the ages have written about this. Yesterday we looked at Spurgeon and Luther, which is kind of weird. We haven't done a lot of that on this podcast before. I go and just read what other people think, but I'm having fun with it and we're going to keep going. So today I want to look at another reformer from the 16th century who wrote a commentary on Galatians. This dude's pretty famous. His name's John Calvin. He's from Geneva, Switzerland, and he had a little different read on things than Luther, but both highly valued the authority of Scripture and thought it was really worth throwing their time and energy and understanding and both took it real seriously. So, not surprisingly, he has some thoughts on this as well. Calvin writes, When we hear that the Son of God, with all his benefits, is rejected, that his death is esteemed as nothing, what pious mind wouldn't break out into indignation, like Paul. Paul therefore declares that those who allow themselves to be involved in so heinous a crime must have been, and he throws a Greek word here in the text, aneotoi, or foolish, or Calvin translates it, disordered in the mind. Paul accuses the Galatians not only of having suffered themselves to be deceived, but of having been carried away by some sort of magical enchantment, which is a still more serious charge. He insinuates that their fall partook more of madness than of folly. Something that Paul refers to the temper of the nation, that being sprung from barbarians it was more difficult to train them. I think that's a really interesting note as well, if you'll recall, the popular theory at the time that Luther and Calvin were writing was that the Galatians were from the northern part of modern day Turkey, and that they were directly ethnically descended from barbarian Gauls who had migrated to that area some 300 years later. And both Luther and Calvin would look at that and say, Oh, well, you guys brought with you all of your weird pagan European superstitions. So that's what Calvin is nodding to here. So some think that Paul refers to the temper of the nation, that being sprung from barbarians, there we go, it was more difficult to train them, but I rather think that he refers to the subject itself. It looks like something supernatural that after enjoying the gospel in such clearness, they should be affected by the delusions of Satan. He doesn't merely say that they were, quote, bewitched or quote, disordered in mind because they didn't obey the truth, but rather because after having received instructions so clear, so full, so tender, and so powerful, they immediately fell away. Erasmus, he was uh is from Rotterdam, he's a guy who just barely predated the Reformation, a scholar of the Bible. Erasmus has chosen to interpret the words here, quote, that ye should not believe the truth, unquote. I'm not quite prepared to set aside that rendering, but I would prefer the word obey, because Paul does not charge them with having from the outset rejected the gospel, but rather with not having persevered in obedience. So Calvin looks at this and he's like, it's the it's such an egregious error that the Galatians made in rejecting the true, tender, beautiful gospel they received and exchanging it for an absolute lie. It's not the kind of mistake that is so subtle, it's the kind of mistake that is so glaring that really one of the sanest explanations for it would be that they were bewitched or the witchcraft or devilry was somehow involved. But then he goes on in tandem with again Erasmus of Rotterdam to say Paul also is treating this as a matter of just simple disobedience. You have the gospel, you know the gospel, you are now disobeying the gospel, which is an interesting phrase, but you look at the tone and tenor of the book of Galatians, and you're like, well, yeah, that's a pretty valid read on it that we're getting there from old John Calvin. Now, maybe some of you are thinking, man, I know you like these history rabbit trails when we go and dig into what other people thought, or we go and dig into the stories of the past to flesh out the context, but this is like three days of history rabbit trail. How long can we really do this? And the answer is longer, because I've found more stuff in the last day or so that I also want to read to you about this. So we're going to go even deeper into the history of the church and see what some even older scholars of the Bible said way back in the day about this interesting conundrum where the Galatians tricked just innocent bystanders who had a spell put over them? Or do they, as Calvin suggests, have ownership here in that they were wantonly disobeying the gospel for whatever reasons? We'll see what a few more super geniuses from way back in the day had to say about that. Manana. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.