Okay, what are we doing here? My clown hammer. Good to go.
SPEAKER_00All right. Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And I went to a school that is now defunct. I guess I've told you that before. A college, that is. I have a zombie alma mater. And for the most part, it was a really good experience going there. I'm sad that it closed. I'm glad the graduate school side of it is still open. It's a little Midwestern private Christian liberal arts school. And I think that I had good professors. I met my wife there. So that was a huge win. But one of the reasons that it stood out to me from other similar schools that I looked at was because of how it came at the topic of student behavior and student discipline. I looked at several schools that had these massive, thick Christian college handbook full of rules for the students. And they were clearly starting with the assumption that you wanted to be a rascal and do naughty bad things when you went to a Christian college. So here's a bunch of rules. You need to learn them all, you need to memorize them all, you need to do them all. And that is how we're going to get you to the behavior that we hope you demonstrate while you're here. But the school I went to, they had a teeny tiny little student handbook. And it was mostly just one guiding principle that they had there. It was something like at this school, we expect you to live up to community expectations for a Christian college student. And then it was really open-ended after that. And you were supposed to just, I guess, think and do good things and not stupid things because you wanted to do good things and knew that stupid things were stupid because I guess the assumption was like you liked God and wanted to be here for a reason. I just thought it stood out to me. I really liked the the whole principle there, the whole approach there. Both the colleges I didn't go to with the big thick handbooks full of rules, and the college I did go to with the teeny tiny little handbook with just a couple rules, they both wanted the same outcome. That is for the Christian college students to handle their business well, behave well, not do horrible things. But they just came at it in really different ways. One starting from negative assumptions, you will not do good things unless we lay down big-time rules and show you how we're going to enforce them. And the other one came at it more positively, saying, Yeah, we've tried to go and recruit students who would just want to get this right. And so we're going to start with that and see if we can just make it work that way. See if we can get there positively. Likewise, we got a conflict, we got a tension that's pretty similar to that in the book of Galatians in chapter two. And I think the tension goes like this the agitators in the book of Galatians, the people who showed up and threw these fledgling churches into confusion. Look, they're clearly the bad guys in the Bible, in the New Testament. They're clearly the ones who are getting it wrong, but the best bad guys are running just parallel to the truth in their motivations. Snidely whiplashies with their curly evil mustaches, they're not interesting bad guys, because, you know, they're just stupid people who just want to see everything burned down, that is not interesting. The best bad guys in any kind of story in the real world or in fiction are the ones who maybe kind of have a point, and you can see how they got there, and they've got really deep conviction that they're the ones who are right and are doing the right thing, and that's why they have to be controlling or monstrous or violent or whatever it might be. And I think that's the case here with the Judaizers, that is, the people of Pharisaic descent, people who used to be Pharisees, now they're Christians, or maybe they're still kind of Pharisees and they're just bothered by the whole Christian thing. They are concerned that if people sign up to follow Jesus as the Messiah out of Judaism, both Jewish people and Gentiles, if they sign up to follow Jesus, it's soft. There's no law here anymore. The whole rule book, what just gets thrown out, and they're concerned that it's gonna turn into total chaos. And sure, I mean, there some of it's they would be sad to see the culture and all the trappings of everything that goes on around the temple and with the sacrificial rhythms of ancient Judaism go away. I mean, anything that threatens that, they're gonna be concerned with and it would be sad to see it go. But it would appear that the main thrust of their critique of the Jesus thing, at least as we're talking about it here in the book of Galatians with Paul, is the idea that, at least ostensibly, well, you're all gonna do bad things. If we don't have the big thick rule book, starting from the assumption that you will all be very naughty unless the rules are right there, then you're all you're all gonna be naughty. And the Jesus, it seems like he takes away all of the reason with his free grace and free forgiveness for you people to behave well and do good. What's to stop you from just being super licentious and engaging in all kinds of disruptive, ugly, raucous behavior? That's their concern. But once again, what we're getting from Paul is a very dense, difficult to understand, maybe on the first pass, but understandable with a little closer look. Section of writing here at the end of Galatians 2 that is very theologically important, but understandably, we're going slow for a reason. It's uh it's challenging. This isn't the easiest thing ever to parse through. Well, here's what we got so far. We who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. Okay, we've covered this a ton, like for a week, you and I, with the clown hammer. The law is not a device to make salvation happen. That isn't why it's there. It isn't that Paul hates the law or thinks it has no value. He's just saying this isn't an instrument of salvation. That isn't the job it does, that isn't the role that it plays. He goes on. 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. You'll notice at no point here is he saying the law was a mistake on God's part. He blew it. There never should have been an Old Testament, there never should have been an Old Testament law. I reject the whole thing. No, it's not like that. I think what he's saying is if you are depending on the law to save you, you are misunderstanding what the law does. That isn't the right tool for that job. If the job is salvation, the law is the wrong tool, and the gift of Christ's grace is the right tool. You don't, I mean, the metaphor breaks down because you don't use the tool. So it's kind of like if my son and I are doing a project, I'm like, hey, dude, don't pound in that nail with that saw. That shouldn't be taken as me being like, I hate saws. Saws are bad, saws were a mistake that never should have been invented. Now, obviously, what I'm saying is it's just the wrong tool for the job, and it's not going to get you anywhere. Absolutely, the law is useful for revealing the character of God. Absolutely, the law is useful for giving a sense of God's moral will. Absolutely, the law is fruitful for painting a clear picture of the human problem and the distance between us and God. I quoted from that a little bit of James yesterday, but James says that absolutely the law is useful for demonstrating our inability to keep the law and our inability as imperfect beings to make ourselves perfect. The law is also useful for pointing a bunch of glowing giant neon arrows right at Jesus, because all the things that the law ultimately doesn't do, Jesus does. The law screams and begs for exactly who Jesus is and the role he plays. And when he shows up, it's perfect fit, lock and key. So the law is not inherently bad, it's an inherently good thing because God made it in the book of Hebrews, right in the middle of that very complex book, it gets spelled out for us. There's not like there's anything wrong with how God drew up the arrangements in the Old Testament. No, the weakness was with the people who couldn't hold up their end of the bargain. That's why the completion of that old deal in Christ was so needed. That's why there needed to be a solution here that really isn't about human effort at all, because human effort will never solve the thing. So all of that gets laid out. But then even if Paul's critics were like, okay, you got me with the saw and the hammer and the nail thing, that was a pretty good analogy. That works. I get it. But Paul, everybody's gonna be bad. I mean, in that way, even if it wasn't on purpose, this Jesus, as you're portraying him, promotes sin because his free grace is gonna make everybody licentious and do things the wrong way. Well, Paul speaks to that. Verse 17. Hey, we're moving forward. It's been a minute. If while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Ooh, so wow, that's a pretty good restatement of the question, I think. I don't think this is Paul just throwing this out and nobody's ever thought of it. And Paul's like, ah, I'm doing a little too well here, my whole argument about the two ways and only one works and the other one doesn't. You know, that I've got too much traction. Uh winning here is just too easy. Let's uh let's see if we can shoot a hole in my own argument. I don't think that's what Paul's doing. I think what Paul's doing here is repeating something that he's heard, that everybody he's talking to has heard. Maybe he's repeating something here, a counter argument against the grace of Christ, that Paul himself, back in the day when he still went by Saul, had tried out when he was debating with Christians. So again, if while we seek to be justified in Christ it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not. If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I'm a lawbreaker. Now look, in fairness, at this moment in the letter, Paul does not completely expand on exactly how it is that people who are in the grace of Christ would then go on to obey the commands of Christ and to obey the moral commands of God and operate in a way that is in keeping with the moral aspects of the law. He just kind of gives us a hint in some really famous verses that are still to come here in chapter two, but it's a couple chapters down the road here where he's going to fully flesh out the idea and give us a much clearer picture of what life in the spirit looks like. Or to go back to my overwrought metaphor that I've kept on going to, or what it looks like to do it because you want to, to do it positively, to do it out of a heart of gratitude and looking forward without a gigantic burden of the law upon you, like the college that I went to that didn't heap a bunch of rules on us, but instead was like, hey, you know, you we think that you probably want to get this right, and here's what it looks like. It's pretty open-ended. Go get them. So Paul is gonna flesh that out. We're gonna get a way better sense of what that looks like and what it means. But effectively, his answer to the critique, well, isn't this just gonna make everybody just screw around and be bad if we don't have all of these rules and everything? Is right here. Verse 20. 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. The idea is that that old nature that needed to be controlled with the law has been put to death. It's been replaced by a new nature. Death has been replaced with life, a life given by Christ, a life given by God. And this life in the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit, something we'll get to a little bit later on this season. And so what Paul is describing is a death to the old self and a resurrection into a new life in Christ, and that this is so forward-looking and so proactive that the fruit, the good stuff, the obedience, the ethics, the morality, whatever you want to call it, it happens through proactive, positive, gratitude-filled, forward looking as the one who has been made alive in Christ through no effort of their own lives this new resurrection, spirit-led life of love and gratitude toward God and of kingdom agency for the things of God. Effectively, Paul is saying the law approach not only doesn't work for salvation, it's the wrong tool, but the law approach it makes you reactive. And even if it looks like obedience, you're getting there in a way that isn't nearly as effective as this other way, which is the gift of God and not born out of the works of any person or the effort of any person. I'm down to the very last bit that I want to do here with Act One of the Book of Galatians, with Galatians chapter two, and all of this stuff that we've been looking at, but I want to give it fair treatment. I want to give it a little more time. So we're gonna hit pause here. We'll pick up right where we left off next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.