Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are working our way through the story of how Peter and Paul came to be in Antioch at the same time and how they ended up in an awkward middle school lunchroom situation where there's a clear social pecking order, and Peter played his hand wrong in such a way that it made Paul real mad because it was doing damage to the church and the Christians there. And it's a whole thing. And rather than just writing it off as some silly, petty little middle schoolish thing, we're trying to dive deep into it to really understand what's going on here. We've been working on this for the last couple days. If you haven't listened to the last couple episodes, maybe go catch those real quick. Or maybe not. It's the internet. You can do whatever you want to do, and we'll get going on it right now. Well, right after the thing I just read you, where Peter goes and knocks and he tells everybody, oh, tell everybody about it. I'm getting out of here. And then we get this little aside about the death of Herod Agrippa. Herod, I did I say Herod the Great's son before? That's not Herod the Great's son, it's Herod the Great's grandson. If I said son, it's a complicated family tree. Sorry, that was a misspeak. Herod Agrippa, who's Herod the Great's grandson, we get this tiny little aside about his death. And I guess that would still count as a plot, but then the very next thing that happens is we jump back to B plot and we follow Barnabas and Saul, who are returning from Jerusalem with John Mark. So there's a lot of connective tissue there to the scene that we just wrapped up with Peter in Jerusalem. And we follow them back up to Antioch to the B plot. So it's kind of like this cool little literary narrative crossover where the A and B plot, instead of there being a cold jump from one to the other, they're sort of woven together and cross paths for just a moment. Now there is no mention of Peter in the next scene at the beginning of Acts chapter 13 up there in Antioch. But what we do get is the commissioning for Barnabas and Paul to go off on their approval journey, the first missionary journey right there. So now you're caught up with the timeline as I'm thinking about it here, weaving together the A and the B plot. Well, think about what it would be like to be Peter showing up there in Antioch after all he's been through. He's a rock star in Jerusalem, but he's kind of an outsider to Antioch. He's a dude who's sort of had his foot in both worlds in terms of the unfolding of the larger mission of Christ to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Remember, at this point he's already had that vision in Joppa. He's already met with Cornelius, he's already seen miraculous stuff happen by the Holy Spirit in Gentiles. So he knows this is real, but he's still making sense of it at this point as well. And we don't have any evidence that he's really seen any of it at work other than in Cornelius outside of the Jerusalem bubble. And now, due to circumstances, political circumstances, he's kind of a fugitive. He's on the lamb. He's going up to Antioch and he's seeing this maybe with his own eyes for the first time, or at least deeply for the first time. Well, can we cut the guy a break for not knowing exactly what to do socially? Did you ever go to an event or something like that where you were late? Like I always think of camp. I hated it when I would go to any kind of sports summer camp or church camp, Bible camp, whatever. If we were running late, that drove me crazy. It's like, dad, drive faster. What are you doing? You don't understand how much it's going to hurt me socially if I get there late. I need to be there and I need to be set up before other people get there so I can be in the position to welcome them and make them feel received. That puts me in a good spot for the whole week. If I'm the last one there, I'm kind of at everybody else's mercy and I'm trying to dig out of a social hole from the beginning. You can say that I was overthinking it, but I went to like 20 different camps at times when I was a kid, and this totally proved out every single time. I felt off kilter. Maybe you did too, if I was late to an event like that. Like, I don't know quite where to stand or sit or what to do. And sometimes when I was in that environment, it would bring out even more awkwardness for me than it would otherwise. Heck, why am I talking about this? Is like this is how it used to be. This is still how it is. And I would like to think that I'm a pretty socially sophisticated adult who can read a room and handle my business pretty well, but I still feel unsettled at times. And if I feel a little wobbly in a social situation, I'm more likely to do and say stupid things that I will face palm over later when I'm by myself and thinking about it, staring at the ceiling at night, trying to go to bed later. When we're at ease and we don't feel insecure, we tend to do pretty well. When we do feel insecure and we're out of our environment, we tend to bumble more often. Sometimes it's not even an intentional character bumble. We're just clumsy socially and we're not thinking straight, and we're worried about whether we look dumb or not, and we do dumb things. What I just said, I think would be the most charitable way to interpret what happens next in this story after Peter arrives in Antioch. Okay, I've been promising this for days, and now we're finally to this part in the narrative, which is kind of fun because we get a little bit of narrative, one tiny little bit more bonus nugget that kind of fits into the book of Acts right here in Galatians chapter two. It goes like this. Verse 11. When Peter came to Antioch, I, that's Paul talking, opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. And when I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, 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? We who are Jews by birth and not, quote, Gentile sinners, unquote, know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus, so 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. He keeps going. This is a long speech that apparently he said all at once to Peter. This is very polished, this is very sharp-witted in the moment. He continues. 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. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live for God. 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. I don't set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing. And that's the end of the quote, and that's the end of Paul's recounting of his confrontation with Peter, and that's the end of Galatians chapter two. But it's not the end of Galatians chapter two for us, because whoa, we are now on the seam of this book where we are going from Paul trying to push back on all of the accusations that have been leveled against him by the Jewish agitators who came along and threw the Galatian church into confusion. I mean, throughout the early part of the book of Galatians here, Paul has been defending the thesis that his gospel message is from Jesus, just like James and Peter and John's and everybody. It's the same message, it's all from Jesus. Paul got it from Jesus too. It's the same message that you Galatians received in the first place, and now other people are coming with a different message and a bunch of lies to back it up, and you need to reject that and go back to the real message of the gospel, which is the same one they preach in Jerusalem, which is the one that's actually from Jesus. And so Paul has taken a lot of time here through the end of chapter one and now all the way through the end of chapter two to say the message of the gospel that was rightly preached to you and that you received, it didn't come from men, it wasn't created by any man. Then he goes on to say, I didn't get it from a think tank in Jerusalem. It wasn't a product of some group struggle sessions to work out something or like an advertising series of meetings where we did demographic studies to figure out who this might play with and how to tweak it just the right way. Nope, it was nothing like that. Also, I didn't get it from the pillars of the faith, the the leaders, the Christian leaders who actually walked with Jesus. They didn't impart this thing to me either. Rather, they discovered that I had the message from Jesus too, and they gave me the right hand of fellowship and signed off on it and said, Great job. And further, I didn't get it from Peter. Like at one point, I actually had to push back on Peter because he had forgotten it for a minute, and I did so publicly. That would seem to be the flow of the argument that we've been getting in Galatians 1 and now all the way through the end of Galatians 2. That I feel like we've pretty much got on lockdown now. I'm tracking with that, I see what he's doing. I used the analogy the other day that Paul has kind of put his hand, the back of his forearm, on one end of the table and just swiped the whole dang thing clear of all of the lies and gossip and divisive falsehoods meant to undermine Paul and undermine the message of the grace of Christ by these Judaizers, these agitators. And by the time we get to the end of chapter two, the discussion table is now clear of the nonsense. We've exerted the order of magnitude of energy needed to debunk the nonsense and the deception. And now we're back to starting point, and Paul, after chapter two, is going to be ready to build back up the actual truth of the thing. I can see by the way, this is unfolding that I'm gonna need one more day to unpack this thing fully, the way I'm feeling like doing it. I'm gonna roll. I'm having a lot of fun with this. This story is really interesting to me. It's engrossing to me. The character aspects of this are really fun, and we haven't even really fully got into unpacking the theology aspect of it yet. So I'm just gonna give myself another day on this. We're gonna pause here. We'll pick it up where we left off next time around. I want to remind everybody about that Patreon model change that is coming. It should be a wash for all of you who currently support, but they're gonna make me switch from a weekly support model to a monthly support model really soon here. Again, they're gonna calculate all of that out, and your level of support should be the same, but please go and check on that to make sure that it is what you want it to be. And thank you all so much for supporting this thing and for tolerating this goofy change that is beyond my control. Thanks for your grace about that. And thank you all to everybody who does not support the program because you don't have to, and I'm just so dang grateful that you're all here. Okay, that's plenty for now. Um Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.