You're listening to the 10-minute Bible number podcast. It's fast on free daily deep dive Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_00The first time I ever remember a celebrity endorsement from a celebrity I knew about was when George Brett came on TV one time. We didn't really have a lot of TV when I was a kid. We had rabbit ears on old dumpy TV. My grandparents, they had cable, they had all the channels. And I was there and I was watching some sports channel or something, and George Brett came on. I was like, I love George Brett. He's my favorite baseball player. He hits baseballs very well and he tries hard and he's my sports hero. Whatever you say to like, I'm gonna like George Brett. And he starts out by saying, Look, I'm a guy, and I like looking at pretty girls and bikinis as much as the next guy. And I was like, oh but the kids watch this, George Brett, and I'm a kid. And that seems kind of skeezy, and I don't think my mom would approve of what you just said there. I don't really like this commercial very much. And what he was doing, he was taking a shot at Sports Illustrated for having the swimsuit issue, and he was trying to say, like, Sports Illustrated is dumb, sports magazining, because it's just dumb and it's for normies. But I'm George Brett, and I'm a good athlete, and I read the Sporting Weekly Journal of Sports in America for sports enthusiasts or whatever the name of the thing was. And so you should read it too. That is a pretty good endorsement, all things told. But it didn't move the needle for me because I was so disappointed by the opening remark as a kid. And maybe that's why I'm emotionally scarred by celebrity endorsements, and maybe that's why celebrity endorsements just don't move the needle for me very much. Or maybe celebrity endorsements don't move the needle for me very much because I just don't care. I am kind of immune to them. I don't care about celebrity political endorsements. I find them kind of eye-rolling and patronizing, and I know that celebrities get paid to do advertisements and they don't sound like humans at all when they read the script for the ads, so I don't really believe it. And even when celebrities who used to be anti-Christian or on team not Christian all of a sudden become Christian, and then a whole bunch of Christian types get all excited about it, and like this is our new favorite person. Even that, I'm like, you know, yeah, that's cool. Wait and see, I guess. Celebrity endorsements, big deal, right? Well, I can tell you who celebrity endorsements did work on, and that was the church in Galatia. Pow pow, see what I did there? We're right back to the thing. The leaders, the pillars of the church, the generation one followers of Jesus who were there in Jerusalem at the Jerusalem Council, the really big names like Peter and James and all of them, their names carried a lot of cloud. And if somebody could invoke their name to say such and such, so and so supports my view on the things, that really mattered a lot. And on the one hand, I sort of get it, because those people walked with Jesus, but on the other hand, if I'm not hearing that directly from them, and it is somebody else who's quoting them, and it also just so happens that this somebody else who's quoting one of the pillars of the faith is saying that they're saying that Jesus said things that don't really sound like Jesus, I don't know, it sounds sketchy. And so Paul is in the unenviable position here in Galatians chapter two of having to call into question in the mind of the Galatian Christians the credibility of celebrity endorsements from the Christian pillars of the church back in Jerusalem, while also not calling those pillars of the church frauds or fakes or bad. I mean, Paul likes those guys. He's with them. He has had a little bit of tension with them, as he's gonna go on to describe in a, you know, another one page here. He's gonna talk about an incident he had with Peter back in the day. But Paul doesn't want to cut the legs out from under James and John and Peter and those guys. I mean, they're preaching the same gospel, they're all on the same page. At the Jerusalem Council, Paul got approved of by those guys. The message, the gospel message going to the Gentiles got approved of by them. So they're all on the same team. It isn't a matter that Paul and Generation one of the Christian leaders who walked with Jesus are on separate teams or are enemies or preaching a different message. No, they're preaching the same message, they're on the same team. Rather, the issue is that these divisive people, the Judaizers, the circumcision party, the people who've come up to Galatia and sown confusion in these Galatian churches, one of the ways that they're doing it is by saying, yeah, Paul is kind of a knockoff second rate Christian celebrity. He didn't really walk with Jesus. He had some kind of religious event or ecstatic moment while he was on a road trip. Maybe he had a bad burrito or something, and then he went right back to Jerusalem and kind of listened to what people had to say and went out. And he's been an unpredictable loose canon who's just said a bunch of stuff. You know, he's had some wins, but he's also kind of goofy and unpredictable. And so we're here to straighten out some of the things that Paul, who was a second rate follower of Jesus and a second rate apostle anyway, we're here to straighten out some of the kooky stuff that he told you guys about you not having to get circumcised. We're here to tell you, with the authority of Jerusalem and the leaders there who totally agree with us, they definitely do. I mean, you don't need to call him a write 'em or check in or verify this, but trust us, they totally agree with us. We're here to tell you that Paul is wrong and we are right. And nine out of ten of Jesus' original disciples polled agree with us and not Paul. So this is really tricky for Paul. Again, because you don't want to just blow those guys up. You like them, you're on the same team, but also you kind of have to do the logical work to attack what really is a logical fallacy here. There's an appeal to celebrity, an appeal to authority to say that just inherently, if we can make you believe that these authority figures said this thing, then this thing is true, even if it doesn't square with the message you heard and received and have seen miraculously confirmed. So we're just gonna do this appeal to authority. Granted, the authority figures in question never actually said the things that we're saying they said. And we're just gonna hope that that is enough for all of you Galatian rubes to side with us and do things our way. So Paul has already had a lot of work to do here in the early going of Galatians, straighten out this mess and undoing gossip, and as we know, it takes an order of magnitude more energy to undo bull crap than it does to make the bull crap in the first place. So he's having to expend a lot of energy, admittedly, here on the front end of this, but he's moving along pretty efficiently. He just got done saying, hey, timeline-wise, I didn't go to Jerusalem and just immediately soak everything up like a sponge. No, I independently received the gospel message from Jesus. I heard that, and it was verified miraculously. It was much later that I went and put that in front of the disciples, the pillars of the church, the authority figures in question there in Jerusalem. They were all like, yep, that's the thing. That's great, that's it, that's good. They didn't have any problem with Gentiles becoming Christians. I mean, Titus was there, he's not circumcised, he's a Gentile, he's great. We all know Titus. They signed off on them. So he makes all of those points. Then now in verse 6, he speaks to this issue of celebrity endorsement that we've been talking about today. He says, As for those who seemed to be important, whatever they were, makes no difference to me. God doesn't judge by external appearance. So those men added nothing to my message. On the contrary, they saw that I'd been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had been to the Jews. For God, who was at work in the ministry of Peter as an apostle to the Jews, was also at work in my ministry as an apostle to the Gentiles. James, Peter, and John, those reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the Jews. All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing which I was eager to do. Now, this gets a little bit tricky for me because I'm talking about the Bible, and I don't really want to criticize the Bible because I think it's from God, but I also have to admit that certain parts of the Bible resonate with me and how my brain works more. And there's been some stuff in Paul's argumentation earlier in the book of Galatians where I gotta really squint to get it. I can get it, I can track with what he's doing, I can kind of reverse engineer what he's responding to. But maybe you're like me, and there's been a few moments as we've been going through this where you're going, okay, I I think I know what he's saying and why he thinks he needs to say it. I think I understand the tension here, but you know, like I just said, I'm having to squint a little bit to get it, but okay, I get it, and I know why we have to do this. This part, however, I'm totally tracking with all of this stuff in chapter two that we've been getting. Titus checked out. That tacitly means everybody signed off on Titus. Everybody's good with this. Everybody had their chance to raise their complaints, but everybody looked at Titus and was like, that guy's a great Christian. He's not circumcised, he's clearly a Christian. That checks out. Great. That's a crystal clear argument. I totally get it. I totally get this next part of the argument. He's saying, No, Peter James and John are great. I'm not going to criticize them just because they've been falsely weaponized against me. I'm not enemies with them. They didn't say that stuff. They don't think that stuff. Look at the track record. We're all on the same page in terms of what the gospel is. And why are we worried about celebrity endorsements, anyways, guys? I mean, that's kind of where Paul starts his argument here. He's like, yeah, it doesn't matter who seems to be important. God doesn't judge by external appearances. I'm going to do the thing again where we abruptly pause right here so we can give this proper time and attention. We're just going to split it into two conversations. We'll pick it up where we left off next time around. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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