Have y'all ever tried out golf? It's it's catching on. People are liking it. I'm seeing it more and more. I think it and pickleball are the two that are really on the rise, but golf is harder. Pickleball is a sport that is meant to make sport accessible to everybody. Golf is elitist. It is mean and it is hard and it is humbling, and I am not very good at it. I didn't play growing up at all. I think the first time I ever played golf was in college. And even then, I was going out with some friends and kind of whack the ball around. And I got torched in that first outing, in part because I'd never done it, but also in part because I went and played with a couple of guys whose parents were pretty well off and they played golf in high school and growing up, they'd had a club in their hand since they were little. But I thought I was gonna cook them because I if we went and played, you know, pick up basketball or whatever, they were trash. They weren't, they just didn't know what to do. They they were not physical, they couldn't hit hard in football, you know, they were they couldn't throw a ball real hard. So I just thought, well, you know, these guys aren't athletes. I think I'm gonna show really well here. And I, as you can imagine, I just got annihilated by these dudes. And mercifully, they were far more humble than I was because they didn't rub it in at all. They were just friendly and helpful and gave me a bunch of pointers that I still remember to this day. And they could tell I was flustered and embarrassed that I was doing such a poor job. And I remember there's one comment in particular where one of these guys went out of their way to be like, hey man, don't feel bad. Golf is a very humbling thing. Nobody, no matter how much they've practiced, can just pick up the club and hit the ball into the hole. It's a long ways away. There's a lot that can go wrong. I've been hitting golf balls my whole life, man, and I still so much goes wrong. So, you know, just have fun and play. I was like, huh. That was a really good point. And it was really kind of him, and I'm glad that he's a more gracious person than me, because I really needed the comfort in that moment because that sport obliterated my ego on my first trip out. But there's a metaphor here. Well, there's a lot of metaphors in golf, but one in particular that I want to latch on to, and it's the one about the guy saying, Hey, I've been raised around golf. My parents had money, I've been hitting golf balls since forever. And instead of that making me into someone who can shoot a perfect 18 every time I go out, instead, it's made me someone who understands just how challenging this is and how humbling a sport this actually is. Likewise. Paul, in what he's saying to Peter and the Galatian church about the relationship between them as Jewish Christians and the heavy burden that is the law, Paul's coming out and he's saying, Hey, Peter, you we're Jews. We're not even, you know, Gentile sinners, quote unquote. We're not outsiders like that. We of all people, with all the advantages we have and all the proximity to the law that we've been raised with, we of all people should know that the law will humble you pretty fast. There's just too much. And especially if you take it down to the level of the heart, where your mind goes, you just you're not going to get it. It humbles us all. And Paul goes on to make the point that because of that, there is no right standing with God that can be earned through strict, perfect, disciplined adherence to the law. It just isn't how it works. And I think Paul's point is we as Jews, speaking between him and Peter, we should know this better than anybody. Here's the quote, just to bring you back up to speed, uh, in this conversation between Peter and Paul, that Paul is relaying here, in Galatians chapter two, he says, When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, this is Paul talking. I said to Peter in front of them all, quote, hey, you're a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it then that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? A great point. The quote continues. I'm going to insert a hey Peter here. Here we go. Hey, Peter, we who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, we know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. Now look, clearly, Paul here is talking about he and Peter. He isn't saying that all Jews at this time knew that a man was not justified by observing the law, but only by faith in Jesus Christ. Obviously, there were a lot of Jews who did not put their faith in Jesus Christ at this time or since. No, Paul is clearly talking about ethnically Jewish people who were religiously raised in Judaism to be strict adherents to the Jewish law. He's talking about people like that, people like Peter and Paul, who had the front row seat to what you get if you try to obey every single aspect of the Old Testament law to perfection, and what you get is not right standing before God. There is no enough. You can't abide by the law hard enough to be, quote, justified, unquote, before God. What do we mean by justified here? Well, right standing. I mean, when you use the word justified, what do you mean? Usually I guess this would be something that would come up in the context of tension in our lives, right? That is to say, we use the word justified when we're kind of arguing a case, maybe about ourselves or someone else. Like, now hold on a minute. I think my wife was justified to say what she said because there was an immediate danger being posed. See what I'm doing there? I'm in this hypothetical situation. I'm saying, ah, my wife was in right standing to have said whatever the hypothetical remark was because of the circumstances. Her actions were right. Well, the situation that humanity clearly finds themselves, ourselves in, as we read through the whole Bible, is that we do not have right standing before God, that there is a gulf between us and God that is created by sin. And not just naughty stuff that we picked because we were in a bad mood or we were just gonna do something wrong today because I've earned it and it's time for an indulgence. No, no, no, no, no. We're talking about all kinds of sin. Sin where we meant to get things right, but we accidentally got things wrong, even though our intentions were good, or sin where we just didn't know any better and we took a swing in the dark, but it turns out that we were morally off target or our execution was bad, or sin that has nothing to do with us at all, that we're just kind of the victim of, and it's just sort of on us because we're a part of this larger institution or this larger moment or spirit of the age, and we didn't even try to make something bad happen, but just causally by our actions, peripherally, bad things happened, and somehow we have some ownership of that. Sin is a very complex, multifaceted thing that involves a whole lot of different levels of our human imperfection before a perfect God. This isn't me like making stuff up. This is what I'm gleaning from this many pages of the Bible from before what were seconds. A lot of pages. Not done. I'm only just second Kings. I'm flipping backwards. All those, and then there's a table of contents and the cardboard at the front. All those pages tell me that what I am observing, the what I'm saying here about the nature of sin is true. It's an inescapable trap. It's both our fault and kind of happens to us. So then, how would we be declared righteous before God? How would we be justified before God? How could we go to God in a debate with God and have God say, You have sin in your life. You are touched by sin and imperfection, and I am a perfect God. How could we go to him and be like, oh, I see how you could see it that way, God? But I think if you look a little closer at this thing, you'll see that I'm actually justified. That all those things that look bad at first glance, sure, actually aren't bad. Well, there's no amount of contextualizing and making our case that can give us right standing before God, and also because all of his judgments are correct, because he's infinite and perfect, he knows everything, and he says something's a certain way, it's actually that certain way. But there's no case that we can make, like, I pled my case there. See, now you'll understand why I did what I did and why in those circumstances what you might call sin, I know to have been right. Huh. That isn't gonna work. Because of quantum physics and the linear nature of time, there is also no amount of compensatory good behavior that a person could engage in to go to God and be like, okay, so you've pointed out that I have sin on me. Sure, but if you go and add up all of these good things I did, I think you will see that they weigh slightly more. So we should be a little bit better than even here. I think I have right standing before you because of that. Well no, those things that were imperfect are still imperfect. You just also happen to have some really beautiful things to go along with them, but they don't cancel or negate the other things. You can't atone or unmake bad things by doing some nice things and putting it on the other side of an equals equation, that isn't how it works, those things still happen, those imperfections still exist. That is not a way either to go to God and say, I have right standing before you, my sin, my imperfection is accounted for. The law looks like a really complex system by which if you do all the different layers of these religious things, morally, ceremonially, civilly, that would ultimately be something you could do action-wise to make you right before God. But even that, Paul is saying, does not undo the imperfection, the sin that is endemic to humanity. No, he says, if anything, like the golfers who were raised with money around golf should know better than anybody that it's a really humbling game. And even if you've played it a whole bunch and at a really high level, you just all that does is cause you to know all the better that it's really hard to get the ball in the hole, and you can't do it on the first swing every time. So Paul is saying, Peter, you and I are Jews by birth. We've been around the law more than anybody. We have got an up-close look at perhaps the best constructive proposal that's out there for how to be justified before God and have right standing before God and deal with our sin and our imperfection, and we know it doesn't work. Come on, Peter. You're living testimony to the fact that that doesn't fix it. The only way that somebody is justified before God, whether you're Gentile or Jew or wherever you're from, is through faith in Jesus Christ. Full stop. Paul was right to call him out for getting this wrong because this was the truth by which Peter was justified before Christ. Look, we got a pretty robust record of a whole bunch of things that Peter got wrong and that he needed atonement for. He screwed up a lot of stuff, and also he got a lot of things on the other side of the ledger as well. But Peter is a walking test case to say you can't just even it out and call that justification before God, because Peter did do a lot of nice things to maybe offset a lot of bad things. Doesn't work like that. Peter also was somebody who was he abided by the law. I mean, at one point he was even kind of flirting with maybe not abiding by the law anymore. You kind of get that impression, like, I don't know, do we even pay the temple tax anymore? Those are kind of some of the rules or rules around the rules that maybe we're supposed to acknowledge. And it was Jesus himself who's like, hey, go get that fish from over there. There's going to be coins in the mouth, he's paid the temple tax. Peter abided by the law, and Jesus helped him to abide by the law. But Paul is reminding Peter, you weren't justified by that either. Come on, Peter, of all the people who should know that the only place where there is life for the sinner, a sinner like you, a sinner like me, a sinner like anybody, is through the grace of Jesus Christ, is through faith in Jesus Christ. So there's a big elaborate theology point here in Galatians two, fifteen and sixteen, but the simple narrative point as we're following along with what Paul is saying in Galatians is hey, the golfer who's been around golf for a long time and raised with the privilege of being around it knows how hard the game is and knows that the more you play, the more you realize you can't hit the ball in the hole on the first time every time. It just doesn't work like that. So, Peter, Paul, those of us who are Jews by birth, but also followers of Christ, we know that we can't follow the law hard enough or do anything that involves our own behavior hard enough to earn right standing with God, to earn justification before God. Rather, if we are to have right standing before God, it is by the grace of Christ plus nothing. And Paul's going to expand on that idea as we move forward. Sweet, more unpacking this really dense, really important theology chunk of the book of Galatians next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.