Jill C Wonka came out about a year ago. I think we've talked about this before. It has Timothy Chalomet in it. This is not the old Gene Wilder Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory beloved classic. This is a musical prequel. It kind of covers their early life, how Willy Wonka became Willy Wonka. In the movie, though, early on, young rubbish Timothy Shalomet Wonka gets off the boat and he goes to this town. He doesn't know how people are in the big city, and some people take advantage of him. It's kind of like the master of the house couple from Les Mizerab. They trick him, they get him to feign compassion, they get him to sign a contract that has a whole bunch of fine print. And even though he's warned, he's so rubbish and trusting, he doesn't read the fine print. Essentially, they make the kid into an indentured servant. It's all very, very sad. But it occurs to me as you're watching the show that even though you might be a little bit annoyed at the mistake, you're not really mad at Willy Wonka. He just made a mistake. He got tricked. He got taken advantage of. That's bad, and it is his mistake. But people were tricking him. They were actively trying to hurt him and deceive him. And so you feel morally different about his mistake than you do about the master of the house couple who are predatory and have eyes wide open and know exactly what they were doing when they tried to trick him with lies and a deceptive contract and with cloying speech. And I think that likewise we have one of these sort of moral crossroads here at the beginning of Galatians chapter three. For the first two chapters, we've been getting a whole lot from Paul where he's saying, like, I am super disappointed in you young people there in Galatia. I'm super disappointed because Christ was portrayed to you, crucified. You understood what the gospel was. And then somebody cut in on your walk with God and they tricked you, they deceived you into something else. And so the crossroads is you get through two chapters and you're like, okay, am I supposed to be mad at the Galatians because they did this to themselves and they wanted this evil, false gospel? Or am I supposed to view them a little bit sympathetically because they were trying, but they're young in their faith and they're naive and rubish, like Willy Wonka stepping off of the boat with 10 silver sovereigns in his pocket. And they just got taken advantage of by somebody way more sophisticated who's been around the scriptures and God stuff way longer, which one isn't? Well, I think that a lot of that hinges, or a good amount of it hinges, on how we read the first verse of Galatians chapter three. You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before your very eyes, Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. Okay, if we read that as you guys went out looking for trouble and you found it, well, then the whole letter takes on a little different tone and we imagine the room a little differently as the letter is being read. But if we read that as someone cast a spell on you, someone tricked you, someone used affectionate words and compliments and flattery to deceive you into believing something that is false and bad for you, we would be a little bit sympathetic, maybe even empathetic to them and be like, oh dang, there before the grace of God, go I. You could trick me with something like that. Man, I bet if I was there, I probably would have made the same mistake. And even if I wouldn't have, well, we're all trickable, and it feels real bad when somebody gets the best of you that way. But well, we're gonna try to make sense of what went wrong and pick ourselves up and keep going. So that's part of why this word bewitched really pops for me. Did they bewitch themselves or did they get bewitched? If I'm to just roll with the English translation and I see the word bewitched, that causes me to think that I should think of the Galatians like Willy Wonka. They got duped, they got tricked. Also, I was raised with the understanding that if you have Jesus in your heart, you can't really be bewitched unless it's something that you want to have happen to you. And also, anytime a word like bewitched or witchcraft or anything like that happens, as we discussed yesterday, my compass spins a little bit. I don't know exactly what to do with it. So we're gonna dig into this thing because I do think it's pivotal, I do think it's important. We're gonna try to figure out what the text actually means and how we should read it and how we should feel about the Galatians and to do this. I have got my Greek New Testament here. We don't do the Greek thing or the Hebrew thing a lot around here. One of the reasons is I don't want to give you the impression that you can't do this for yourself. When in fact you can study the Bible for yourself. You are smart and competent, and you're very good at interpreting things, and you don't even need me. This is just something that's fun that we do together. Hopefully, it spurs on some thought. But you can pick up a Bible, you can read it, you can understand it. God wants you to understand it. The Holy Spirit is real, you get help with understanding it. The Bible's meant to be read, it's meant to be understood. So I don't like to go into the original languages a lot because that might accidentally give you the impression that this is for fancy people. But the second reason that I don't go into the original languages a lot is because I'm trash at them. Just horrible. Did I go to school for this? Yes, yes, I did. Have I studied it a whole bunch since I went to college and seminary and then post other? You don't need to know all my resume. Yes, I have studied it a ton since then, and I am still just really bad. I'm glad there are professionals among us who are good at this, but let's just break this text down a little bit anyway. And please disregard the pretentiousness of going to the Greek. Don't worry, as soon as you hear me start to pronounce this stuff, you'll be like, oh never mind, that's not pretentious. This guy really is awful. He's not being fake humble. Okay, what do we got here? I'm gonna sound this out like a baby. Oh anetotoi. So oh foolish uh Galati, Galatians. I don't know. This is bewitched. I don't know what this word is. This is gonna be ugly. Aboskanen. Eboskanen is the Greek word in question. And I have got another little resource over here, a lexicon. That just helps me figure out like, hey, how is this word used in Greek all the time back in the day? Are we translating this in a way that's consistent with all the other uses of this word? And yeah, bewitched. Tealathia. Oh, I know that one, that's truth. So is bewitched you. Oiskatophtholamos. That's gotta be eyes, because optho is in there. Double checking. Yes, eyes. Yes,us Christos, I know who that is. Proigrafe Estra nemenos. I don't know. Well, proagrafe, so pictured and a Stauromanos. It's gotta mean having been crucified. So, okay, that was ugly, I get it, but and slow and painstaking and all of that stuff. Like I said, I'm just not very good at this. I have to really grind through it to do the Greek thing. But this is what I'm getting. I'm looking at the Greek text in front of my face. I've got this little lexicon open over here. I had to cheat on two words as we were going along, but it looks like the English that I've been reading from here is a really reliable representation of what I'm seeing in the Greek and what you just heard me clumsily read in the Greek. So it looks like the English translation has bewitched. It's an accurate representation. So this would support the idea that the bewitching happened to the Galatians as opposed to them somehow participating in the bewitching. This would support the idea that we should view the Galatians in more of the willy wonka sympathetic rubbish, haha, you guys just missed out and you got tricked kind of way, than in the, hey, you're responsible for this because you did it kind of way, which would seem to be a little bit morally darker. Okay, big picture for today. The English I have in front of me seems to be a really good reflection, as best as I can tell, of what I've got in this Greek text right over here. But I've still got two outstanding questions, and I want to go and get some more help on this tomorrow. And those two questions are okay, well, how do the great minds of the Christian past read this? Do they read it as the Galatians went and caused trouble and we should view them as bad guys? Or should we read this as a thing happened to the Galatians and we should feel sympathy for them? And then the second big question is, was it supernatural? Is there actually a bewitching going on here? And I thought it'd be fun for me to go and dig deep into my book archives of a lot of the great Christian Bible commenters and theologians from across the centuries and see if we can find any kind of consensus on what these really smart people thought about how to answer those two questions in this particular text. Should be fun. It also seems like a great excuse to do one of these things where we just learn it together in real time. So I'm not gonna go read all of this stuff. Tomorrow I'm gonna get my books out. We're gonna hang out with a bunch of really brilliant Christians from across the centuries and try to get a clearer sense of what's going on here so we can have this framed up the right way moving forward. Are the Galatians sympathetic characters like poor Rubish Willy Wonka, or are the Galatians deeply corrupt bad guys who were looking for trouble and just needed a little help finding the right language? And when they got it from the Judaizers, they went in the direction they always wanted to go all along. Much smarter people than me will weigh in on that, manana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.