You're listening to the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. It's Fast Fun Free Daily Deep Dive Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_01Alright, this is gonna be weird. I don't know how to get around it. It's just it is what it is. The next text we've got uses a word, and the word is bewitched, and that raises a question for me that I want to ask to you on the front end of this. Where does your head go when you hear a word like bewitched or witchcraft? What do you think about it? What does that conjure for you? Ah, conjure. See what I did there? I didn't either until just now, but I'm keeping it. What does that conjure for you? For me, my head goes to two different places when I hear that kind of terminology. Place number one is proper fear. That's kind of freaky. The practice of trying to tap into the forces of darkness, the forces of Lucifer, Satan who's trying to resist God. And I mean, that's freaky stuff. The occult is freaky stuff. But then there's another part of my brain that just shrugs at the whole thing, which I know it's probably it's probably a bad response. I get it, I get it. But you gotta understand, I was raised right at the tail end of the age of the satanic panic, when anything it seemed that an older conservative-minded person didn't understand just got labeled satanic. All the toys that I wanted to buy at the store and play with are all satanic. If God wanted there to be turtles with nunchucks, he would have made them with nunchucks. Okay. My bad. I like the wrong turtles. Cobra! The cobras snakes that have poisoned the snake in the gardens, that's the serpent. Nope, but I don't want you playing with the G.I. Joes. Okay. And none of this was from my parents. I mean, that's not how they acted, but I got this stuff all the time. All the bands are satanic, all the movies are satanic, all the cartoons are satanic, even the sweet and harmless looking ones. And I don't know, maybe some of it was. Probably some of it was, but when it's like in The Incredibles, when Dash says if uh when everyone is special, nobody is. Well, it's kind of the same thing. When everything's satanic, eventually that just wears off. You can't just call everything satanic. Eventually it doesn't mean anything anymore. So I'm kind of I have a split mind on this. My reflexive knee-jerk reaction to bewitched or witchcraft or any of that kind of language might on one day be like, ooh, that is to be taken seriously. That is a really big deal. And might on another day be like, nah, there's a demon behind every bush for some of these people. And okay, it's witchcraft. I have a buddy who it's interesting, he's not even a Christian, but he's like, I'm telling you, man, the Satanist thing, it is real. While everybody's been rolling their eyes at this for the last 20 or 30 years, there's been a whole thing, I'm telling you, everything is run by some kind of Satanist cabal. And it's in Hollywood and it's in politics. And if you look closely, you can see this occult imagery everywhere. And I listened to him politely and everything when he was laying this all out for me at lunch a few years ago. And I was kind of like, okay, pal, you know, it's all right. Some I dominate some meals, you get to dominate this one. But in fairness, like he said, keep an eye out for these things. You'll see it now that I've told you about it. And I was like, huh. Yeah, that is kind of everywhere, isn't it? Okay, well, maybe you have a point. I don't know. You look at what some of these people do who are in charge or what they're accused of. My goodness, it's um pretty dark. It feels like some sort of maybe dark mass or black Sabbath or dark ritual that certain people are like pledging their allegiance or trying to tap into dark forces. I don't know. I don't know. Is there something to it? I this is what I do know. The Bible holds out there being the idea that there are dark forces, that there is an enemy, and that that enemy of God has legions, and that that there's a certain degree of power and a certain degree of leash that God is giving the enemy during this age. And for a scientifically minded man like myself who tends towards skepticism, uh yeah, that I got some stuff to overcome there. I'm gonna tend to raise an eyebrow at those kind of claims when they are made, but also I don't know if I want to say it into this microphone, but I have seen a couple of things, and I'm not given to that at all. I did basically an entire podcast called Ironwood Rhino a while back because I just kind of wanted to compare notes with other people and see what had they seen, because I've seen a couple of things, and they were weird, and I still don't know exactly what to do with them. And I think whatever happened there was real, but I don't totally have categories for it. So again, like you're just not talking to an expert. I don't know that the whole idea of the dark forces in the Bible is that it's all about lying. The devil is the father of lies. The first thing the serpent does on screen, who later we learn is the devil, is lie. The devil is characterized as like this roaring lion that goes around just skulking in the shadows, strategizing how to destroy people, destroy the beautiful things of God. So I don't know. I guess it's supposed to be subtle, right? And it's supposed to be just sneaky enough that you don't really know that it's there and that it's going on. I don't know. Do I sound crazy? I'm not trying to sound crazy. I'm trying to just give you my honest take on where my head goes when things like this come up. I'll tell you this much. For every passing thought that I have about the devil, Satan, Lucifer, witchcraft, I have about 10,000 thoughts about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, salvation, redemption, the Bible, the kingdom, the values of the kingdom. My brain tends much more in that direction. But there's a word here in Galatians 3. Remember, we're doing a podcast on Galatians. Here in Galatians 3, right at the beginning, that well, I'm trying to figure out. Am I supposed to take Paul literally here? Or is he just using like a metaphor or something? I'll read it to you. We'll talk about it today and tomorrow, and we'll see what you think. Galatians 3, 1. Remember, this is coming right after what feels like a pretty natural ending place for the whole letter. If maybe Paul wanted to wrap it up right there, he could have. But then he pivots back into the room, it kind of feels like, and it's like, and here we go, I got another thing. And it's a good thing that he does metaphorically pivot back into the room because this is where he really fleshes out that idea of life in the spirit that he teases at the end of Galatians 2, saying stuff like, 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. Really, the rest of Galatians is going to be him fleshing out that idea. And I know some of you have shot me notes or texts and been like, are we going to talk about Galatians 2.20 more? And the answer is yes, because the rest of Galatians is kind of about Galatians 2.20, so we'll keep bouncing back to that. So it feels like it'd be an okay place to stop there at the end of chapter two, but he keeps going. It's good that he does because he needs to flesh out that idea. We gain so much from it. But it starts with what feels like a nod to the occult. He says, You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes, Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. Huh. Okay. Well, I suppose bewitched there could mean you know who tricked you? Who got in your head? Why who did the uh Grima worm tongue trick on you and spoke with a silver tongue into your ear, telling you words that you wanted to hear, and manipulating you into believing something stupid, who put you under their spell? I mean, we use language like that socially. You've seen really unhealthy relationships in your life where you've got a friend who's doing pretty good, and they have healthy values and all of that, but then they meet a significant other, and all the people who love your friend are like, I don't know if this is a good idea. And all of a sudden their values change to weird things, and all of a sudden they don't want to hang out with anybody anymore. And you're like, uh, yeah, that guy put a spell on her. She put a spell on my friend, whichever way it might go. I mean, you've known people in your life who you've seen fall under a metaphorical enchantment, or heck, maybe it's an actual enchantment. I don't know. But people can get in other people's heads. That's what I'm driving at. And it's possible that what Paul means here is these agitators, the Judaizers, the people who argue for the opposite of the gospel that the Galatians received back in the day. You know, maybe they just came up and they just made persuasive arguments, and metaphorically, Paul is saying, you are under their spell, and you need to have the spell broken or the spell lifted. I mean, that's a very powerful metaphor. Paul has lived out that metaphor. He was under a spell, so to speak. He was a slave to everything that was wrong and willing to shed blood for it. And then there's, I mean, literally a miraculous moment where something like scales fall off of his eyes, and the enchantment is broken, and all of a sudden he can see. Except it's not really a metaphor. It's kind of literal in Paul's life as well. I mean, he actually was under an enchantment, right? I mean, can we call it that? I think we can call it that. He was pulling in the wrong direction. He was involved in blood rituals, he gave his approval to this stuff. He'd lost the plot completely in terms of what was right and redemptive, and then wanted he wasn't content to just keep that local, but he wanted to take it on the road. I don't know. I I think he was enchanted. I mean, the more I read about what the world was like and what people think, even in this very enlightened Greek culture where philosophy and law and art were so celebrated, the more I learn about how much intelligent people in that time believed in and practiced pagan magic and what we would now call the occult, and how much practical magic was a part of what they did, and how much they were willing to spend money for magic, the more I guess I might be inclined to read a passage like this as literal. Just because we live in a time where our eyes are kind of shut to the idea of the spiritual world or the supernatural world, doesn't mean that's how all of time has been. Really intelligent people bought magical scrolls at great price to bewitch and control other people in this time, in the culture and the context that Paul is writing in. We got to game this out more. I just need to think about it more. I want to hear your feedback tonight, and then I'll probably incorporate that a little bit as I'm thinking it through tomorrow. But at the very least, what Paul is saying here is clearly you had the things of God, and then people came and gave you the things of not God, and you fell for it. You got suckered by it. And how could you fall for this? How could you be allured? How could you fall for that siren's song? You know they pull you under and drown you, even if they look real pretty. That they're dangerous. How could you fall for that succubus that showed up in your sleep? You know that's a monster, a demon in disguise. Don't give in to that. How could you fall for those magic beans, that trick, that deception? You know it's an enchantment. You know it's a lie. So, metaphorical or literal, either way, Paul is rightly disgusted with the people he's talking to. He's shocked that they would fall for one of the oldest tricks in the book, but indeed he's saying they have fallen for it. What merits all further discussion is what are the supernatural underpinnings of that? Is there anything that we're supposed to do with this word bewitched as we're reading this thing? This is a very different conversation. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm gonna keep working it through, but this is how we do it, right? Is this the advantage of this format? We just go with whatever's next and we game it out together as best as we can. So look forward to hearing your thoughts on it. I'm gonna do some reading and thinking on this, and we'll check back in on this idea of the foolish Galatians and Paul's question who has bewitched you next time around. All right, I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.