Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00Not one comment, not one email, nothing. I was crickets. I didn't hear a thing about that sick Jeff Moore in the distance reference that I worked in two days ago. I don't know, whatever. I mean, hey, things happen. But we're on to bigger and better things, like the transition between the end of Galatians chapter two and the beginning of Galatians chapter three. Now I was making the argument yesterday that I imagine that it's very possible that these Galatian church members, upon hearing the reading of the book of Galatians for the first time ever in history in their church, think it's very possible that once they got to the end of chapter two, a whole bunch of them were like, dang, that was really good. Paul makes a great point. Okay, I think I'm getting it. And I think we're probably done now. And I suspect that maybe they were surprised that the letter kept going because it was such a complete thought with a beginning and a middle and an end in those first two chapters. I think the first two chapters are coherent and direct and theological and clarifying and dispensing of gossip and tugging at the heartstrings enough to have been very, very effective. Now the rest of Galatians is just butter. It makes it even better. It makes it all come into focus that much more. But I could see how people would be like, yeah, we're probably done when they got to the end of chapter two. And to picture that, to just defend my argument here a little bit, let's look at the first two chapters and just think about how each bit of this would hit if you were there hearing this bit of Bible being debuted for the first time. I mean, they didn't know they were hearing brand new Bible or this was going to be in the Bible, but they were. So let's just try to picture these two chapters being read for the first time ever together and imagine what might have been going on in this room. Paul, right at the beginning, he's like, Well, I'm Paul and I'm an apostle, sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead and all the brothers with him to the churches in Galatia. Doesn't that hit a lot harder now that we've been through it a little bit, by the way, that he opens it by hitting all of his credentials and telling everybody that this isn't something that people made up. I'm an apostle of Christ. I'm sent by Christ. And so obviously, you know, listen up. So this is what they got first this introduction from Paul that feels real, real weighty. Then right after that, he says a couple of nice things, you know, grace and peace to you and all of that. And then as soon as that part is done, he just rips into him. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Well, there's the thesis. Okie dokie. All right, that's laid out right there in the first two chapters. Let's see if he pays off the thesis in the first two chapters, and it would feel like it was time to be done after the first two chapters. All right. So where did the problem come from? How did this happen? Oh, he goes right into it. Evidently, some people are throwing you into confusion or trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. Okay, so this wasn't just an accident. We didn't bumble into it. People willfully and maliciously did this. Okay, well, I mean, Paul, do you have a problem with those people? Let me see here. But even if we are an angel from heaven, should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned. Yes, Paul has a problem with it, real serious problem. I mean, he's probably not going to say it twice, though. I mean, saying they should be eternally condemned if they preach a gospel different than the one that the Galatian churches received at first. I mean, you probably only need to say that once. Nope. He goes on. As we've already said, so now I say to you again, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned. Well, yes, Paul, as we have already said. You mean like in the immediately preceding sentence? There's passion here, and all the people in the room would have felt this. I think a lot of heads would have been hung. There'd be a few people, personality-wise, who were pretty defiant by this point, who would have been looking right at the guys reading, trying not to betray how the letter was making them feel. But this room would have been tense at this point. In just a few short sentences, Paul has already said who he is and what his credentials are. He's already made it clear that he speaks with the authority of Christ and that the message he's defending isn't made up. It's from God. And now he's laid out his thesis and said, I'm shocked that you guys are getting this wrong, and I got a real problem with the people who inflicted this on you. But now we go into another movement, you'll recall. He says, Am I now trying to win the approval of men or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I wouldn't be a servant of Christ. So now he's shifting gears to defend his thesis that he is speaking authoritatively and on behalf of Christ and he is representative of the true gospel. And he's going to pivot to address a bunch of critiques of him that you and I don't know about, you'll recall, but that we can triangulate. It's not too hard to figure out what people must have been saying about him based on the ways Paul defends himself. I'm not going to read all the stuff that Paul said to defend himself, but basically he's going to give him a timeline and be like, I was here, I was here, I was here. There was no opportunity in here for me to go and get some fake made-up gospel from somewhere else. If you look at my timeline for when I met the apostles and when all these things happened, you will see that this wasn't some man-made thing we all cooked up together. This was from Christ Himself. All we did when we met, all the different pillars of the church, was figure out that we were all on the same page. And they gave me the right hand of fellowship and we're like, great job. This is awesome. Everybody was excited, everybody was on the same page. No backroom cooked up stuff, no misunderstanding between the Jerusalem faction and me, where they were actually doing this works-based gospel, and I just misunderstood them and they just misunderstood me. And then they accidentally gave me the right hand of fellowship, and I went out on my own and was just wrong about everything and founded your church here in Galatia wrongly. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. We communicated clearly. We had the same gospel from Christ. When we compared notes, it was identical. They enthusiastically gave me the right hand of fellowship. So any rumors or lies that those agitators have been spreading about me, Paul making stuff up or being somehow a rogue disciple of Jesus, uh-uh, that doesn't hold up. It doesn't withstand any kind of scrutiny. Those are unserious accusations. Paul has now debunked that. We're not even to the end of chapter two yet. I mean, it feels like he's covering all of his bases here. And I have to imagine that after Paul really rather succinctly hustled through this backstory and timeline, there were more people in the room who were looking awkward because they had either proliferated those lies about him that were so easily debunked in the letter they just heard read aloud, or they had fallen for those lies and that had affected a whole bunch of other things in their brains and stuff they'd said and factions they'd aligned themselves with. I'm guessing by this point already there was some pretty serious regret in the room. I'm guessing at this point already, a few of the listeners to this letter with softer hearts were already getting a little distracted, and we're gonna have to hear this letter read again later on because they were spacing off just a little bit, thinking, I've already heard enough. I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I listened to lies. He's right to criticize me. Uh, okay, I need to make things right with Carl and Jessica and Dave. And oh, I said something at work too. I gotta make it right with them. I have done damage. I've made a mess. I need to repent of this whole thing. There were people whose hearts were already softened by here. I betcha. I bet there were other people who were locking their jaw in by this point after Paul gets done with his timeline bit and they're like, mm-mm-mm-I'm not budging on this. I don't care if Paul says it. I think it's a grand conspiracy and Paul's lying. And I bet there were a few people in the room like that who were distracted and having trouble listening to this part of the letter because they're already cooking up excuses for their behavior and ways to explain why what they said is actually true, even though Paul, the chief witness to the life of Paul, just debunked it. So, I mean, this room, man, there's so much drama happening unspokenly in the minds and with the eye contact of people all around this church that has frankly been wounded by heresy and by people who wanted to hurt them. And then finally, these first two chapters, as you well know by now, if you've been hanging around with me, it wraps up with Paul addressing a little miniature elephant in the room, a little scuttlebutt, a little buzz that have been going around about some kind of tension between him and Peter. What was the nature of that tension? The appearance of division there would give guileful, divisive people who wanted to do damage all the ammunition they needed to plant ideas and to set people's imaginations running wild about division between Peter and Paul and what might that division even be over? So Paul's gonna speak to that next and set the record straight, and basically does so by saying, I was right, Peter was wrong, here's exactly how Peter was wrong. Maybe you heard Barnabas took his side. So just because Peter and Barnabas were on the same side for a minute doesn't mean they were right, they were wrong. Even Barnabas was wrong for a minute. Now I'm guessing at this point, people in the room really started to squint because this juicy little morsel, think about it, this would be the juiciest thing they'd heard in this entire gossip fest that had damaged the church over the previous months or a couple of years or whatever. Peter and Paul at each other's throat? Paul and Barnabas? The son of encouragement, the guy who vouched for Paul in the first place, they're on the opposite side of an issue. Oh, Paul must be in the wrong. These outsiders who've come up and set the record straight about how the gospel actually works and how being right with God actually works. I mean, they must be right if Paul and Barnabas, I mean, Paul's a mess. This the whole thing's a mess. I wash my hands of it. I'm listening to these new outsiders who've come in. Well, now the scales are metaphorically falling off of the Galatian church's eyes as they are hearing this read aloud and for the first time hearing Paul speak to the controversy and realizing, oh dang, this wasn't an indicator that Paul was out of control as we had been led to believe. This is an indicator that Peter was acting like Peter used to act back in the days when he was hiking around with Jesus, his big impulsive goofball behavior came through again, and Paul was actually the one who stabilized it. Whoa, we'd been led to believe that Paul was the one who was in the wrong here, but Paul was in the right, and Peter was in the wrong. And as they're sitting there thinking this through and having this moment of realization, and quietly, as all these people listening to this letter being read aloud for the first time are running this complete recalculation of everything they've been told and everything they thought they understood about this gossipy weird situation, as they're still running those calculations, the people up front, they're still reading the letter, and the next part gets read, and it's that big theology discourse that you and I have spent the last week and change on saying that the law is hopeless. There isn't life in it, and that's not what you guys received. And every one of you who's a Jew, you know better. We couldn't uphold it. Why are we trying to throw that off on the Gentiles? He says, So we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law, no one will be justified. And I bet around that room, all of a sudden, a few of the people who've been a little wishy-washy or good people who got things twisted up and made some mistakes and weren't afraid to admit having made a mistake, I bet they kind of start nodding along with the letter just a little bit at that point. And they're like, Yeah, dang, that's right. No, that that's right. That's the message we received. We did not receive become Jewish and try to follow all the laws and all the customs and do the proper hand washing and all the proper gestures. The message we received, very simply, as recorded back in the book of Acts, the wages of sin or death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. Boom, there it is. I bet some of them did the surrender cobra thing where they put their hands up on their head, interlaced to their fingers, stared off blankly into a corner of the room and were listening attentively, maybe lightly rocking back and forth, just thinking about what they heard and the mistakes they made. And I bet by the end of Galatians chapter two, as the readers are taking us through Paul's little theology remarks, and as he gets to the spike the football moment in the first two chapters, I bet a bunch of those people's body language are really starting to change. 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, and the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. And now I bet there's some amens or whatever they said back then. Expressions of agreement. I bet there's some verbal affirmation. I bet some of the people who are on the wrong side of this issue were starting to get really agitated, as they can tell by the body language silently, if some of the people they had manipulated and roped into their little faction, they're like, we don't have them anymore. I think Doug just bailed on our team. I think Gary just bailed on our team, and that means his brother-in-law is going to bail on our team as well. We are on an island here all of a sudden, and there are a few people holding on and they're still mad and they still want to agitate, but there's an awakening that is occurring in the room, I bet, at this point. Because what Paul is saying at the end of Galatians chapter two, that sounds like what they signed up for in the first place. That sounds like truth. And then Paul concludes, I don't set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing. And at that point, I think the battle's already won. At that point, the big hitter has come in, set straight all the lies, shined a light in all the dark, deceptive corners. He's starting to run off the rats. People are hearing language, they're hearing stuff that sounds like what they got in the beginning, that gave them life in the beginning. They're hearing stuff that sounds like the theme of life by the spirit. That's what we're doing. That's what we believe. That's what this was all about. This whole community, this whole thing from the beginning. And maybe if Paul had stopped right there and been like, All right, that's the end of my letter. It's a pretty short one. I think you all get it. Maybe that would have got the job done for that church right there. Maybe. But even if it would have got the job done for that church, the rest of us would have been infinitely deprived of what comes next as Paul fleshes out these ideas and gives us a better sense of what life by the Spirit looks like, and as he fleshes out his argument further as to why everything has always pointed toward the true gospel that these Galatians received in the first place. And a little bit preachy here, but I'll do it quickly, and that still gives life for people like you and me today, no matter who we are or where we're coming from or what language we speak, or how we vote, or what we think. This message is still alive, and this message is still for everybody. Oh, to have been in that room. All right, that's plenty. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.