You're listening to the Ten Minute Bible Member podcast. It's Fast Unfree Daily Deep Night Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_00Lying is so overpowered, and it's also so tedious. And there's some common wisdom, some sayings that have been floating around that I think summarize why this is the case. I'm going to get this quote wrong. I always get this quote wrong, but it's going to be close. You've heard it before. You can fill in the gaps and make it right in your brain. The a lie can travel all the way around the world before the truth is even rolled out of bed, or before the truth has even finished breakfast or laced up its boots or whatever the saying is. It sounds like a Mark Twain saying, I don't know who actually said it, but you know, folksy wisdom to communicate what we all know, and that is that lies are salacious and juicy and they spread quick. And especially if it's allows us to think the worst about somebody else, whereas the truth, which is often very boring, it doesn't go quick, especially truth that is refuting a much more interesting lie with which it finds itself competing. That's conventional wisdom number thing about number one about the lying that I thought was interesting. Another one, though, is from an Italian programmer and mathematician named Alberto Brandolini. I think we've talked about this guy before. He has this principle called the BS asymmetry principle regarding lying. Here he makes the case that it takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bullcrap than it does to produce bullcrap in the first place. That's why I say lies are overpowered. They're easy. You just think of something that people might want to believe that is would be particularly helpful to you or interesting if it were true. And maybe it's just plausible enough to run sort of parallel to something that could be the truth, and you just throw it out there and see if it goes. Or maybe somebody else invents it and you repeated it, and you can't be held responsible for that. You heard a thing, you were just repeating what you heard from somebody else. But the truth is, we've all been on both sides of overpowered lies in proliferating things that weren't true. I have done that. I've done it naively, I've surely also done it maliciously or with eyes wide open at some point, not proud of that. But also, we've all been on the receiving end of that. And when we're on the receiving end of that, we realize very quickly, Brandolini is right. It is so hard to dig out from under that stuff. One, because you've got to get into so much minutiae and detail to cause people to have to admit, okay, the facts clearly support this truth and the lie was a lie. In addition, somebody has to listen to that. They have to sit through your whole presentation about when Becky sent that text and the Brandon sent another text just like it three minutes later, but how could he have even known he wasn't at work that day? And I remember that because there was a snowstorm that day, and he said that he was going to go to the car wash, but the car wash closed early, so he didn't end up going there. And I wouldn't have even remembered if it weren't for that car wash thing. But how could he have known and why did he send that text? And you should have seen when I put those screenshots in front of Micah. He got pale, he knew something was wrong. He's in on it too. Are you bored yet? Is it tedious? I'm bored. It's not even a real lie. I'm just running shtick about what it would be like to try to refute an actual lie. It's exhausting to try to deliver that. It's exhausting to try to sit through it. Okay, what are you gonna do? I mean, lies are overpowered, and most of the time, you hope you can just lean on the reputation that you've formed, your own character, and the people will hear the lie and be like, I don't know, it doesn't seem like something she would do. I don't I don't believe that. Uh hopefully that gets it done. But if it doesn't, and there's some people you actually care about clearing it up with, you might have to do the thing where you present all the evidence and go through the receipts and do all the work, and it's just very, very tiring. And if you find yourself in a place where you have to do that, you've got to be pretty shrewd about how you present your case, because if it's long and boring and miserable and sounds bitter, then a thing that was a lie might accidentally sort of become the truth in a way. So you gotta be efficient, you gotta be smart about it, you gotta be quick if you're trying to refute BS or refute a lie, and that is the situation. Here's your great big likewise drumroll. That is the situation Paul finds himself in. People said things about him that were not true, that make him look bad, but also that hurt a bunch of these Christians he cares about in Galatia. Now Paul has to face a similar crossroads, similar fork in the road to what you've had to face many times when you've been lied about, and that is do I do the tedious work of refuting this, or do I just let my reputation speak for itself and move on? I think usually most of us choose the latter because the prior is so exhausting and gets into so much minutiae, but remember, this lie didn't just make Paul look bad. It hurt all of these Christians in these churches in Galatia. So, all right, we're going through the mental flowchart of Paul's decision making here. Some people came along, they told some lies about who Paul is and where he came from and where this message that he has from Jesus came from. They're saying that Paul is just a rogue product of the Jerusalem church, not really a messenger from God. Maybe he said some stuff that was right, but it's all born out of a misunderstanding of a commissioning that he probably got in Jerusalem or something. And these agitators are saying, so you might as well listen to us. We're here with a fresh, precise message from Jerusalem. Paul, not that big a deal, not really a reliable source. He's sort of a Frankenstein creation of misunderstandings born out of Jerusalem anyway. Listen to us instead. Well, okay, well, Paul's like, I clearly I gotta speak to this, I have to clarify this, but now he has to make a decision. Does he go all the way down the rabbit hole and cover every stinking tiny little detail and who said what when, or is he gonna try to streamline it so that he doesn't bore and exhaust the people he needs to convince of the truth of things? And he's gonna choose the latter. Paul, I think, is gonna be really shrewd here in just giving the Galatian church a high-level reminder of where he was and when he was there and how all of this happened in terms of him meeting Jesus and getting the message of Jesus that he gave to them so that he can then get on to talking about the merits of the actual message and not get bogged down in all this exhausting, tiresome Applebee's conversation minutiae. Here's how that goes. Galatians 1.11, we've read this over the last couple of days, we're gonna look at it again. I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preach isn't something that man made up. I didn't receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. Okay, there's the shot across the bow. These guys are lying about everything. I didn't get it from Jerusalem, I didn't get it from anybody. It's straight from Jesus. What you guys heard, it's from God and it's authoritative, not because of me, not because of others, not because of anybody, because it's actually from God. He goes on with his debunking. For you've heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and I tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews in my own age, and I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, is pleased to reveal his son to me, so I might preach to the Gentiles, I didn't consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later to Damascus. Theoretically, everybody listening to this letter would have been thinking, okay, yeah, that checks out. That's right. I have heard this before. Okay, he was really good at Judaism, pretty violently good at it, and he was climbing the ranks, and then he went to Damascus and he met Jesus and he was there for a little while. He was blind, then he got not blind, and then he went out to Arabia. That's right, we have heard this before, and now Paul goes on with his debunking of the lie. He says, Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter, and I stayed with him for 15 days. I saw none of the other apostles, only James, the Lord's brother. I assure you before God that what I'm writing to you is no lie. Later, I went to Syria and Cilicia, and I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report, this man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy, and they praise God because of me. So by providing these receipts, what Paul is trying to do is clear his name and his reputation. He's been charged with being a fraud, and in doing so, he's trying to reassure the Galatian church that the message they have is true and reliable, and they should quit listening to these people who are lying about stuff. Now, if we go and compare what we know about the timeline of Paul's life and how it all unfolded with all the other cues that we get from the New Testament about the timeline as it's set against the larger history of Rome, it looks like there's a gap of three or four years there in the early going of Paul's Christian life. And even if there was no Galatians 1.17 where he's talking about going out into Arabia, we would still have this black hole, this little space toward the end of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, and just extending maybe just into the beginning of the reign of the Emperor Caligula, or just before that. And so this Arabia time of learning, of growth, of travel, of preaching, you know, whatever you make of it, it squares with this time pretty well between 34 and 37 A.D. Maybe at some point we'll talk about it, but Arabia doesn't necessarily mean like Saudi Arabia, basically anywhere to the east, out in the desert, would have been thought of as Arabia to the original audience here. Again, maybe more on that later. But after that, he went back to Damascus because that is kind of his headquarters for Christianity. It wouldn't make sense for him to go right back to Jerusalem. He's still kind of in, I'm sorry, so sorry, who this is going to be really awkward mode with Jerusalem, both with his Jewish pals and with his Christian pals. I mean, this is a pretty crazy reunion when he finally goes back there, as recorded in Acts 9, 26 through 29. It feels like we're on a roll, doesn't it? We're taking ground here, we're getting through this timeline, but also time does matter, and I don't want to bloat this up so much that it becomes an unwieldy episode. So we're gonna divide it up. We're just gonna pick up right where we left off next time around and continue working through Paul's account of his timeline versus the Acts' account of the timeline, and just see how this whole thing adds up to support Paul's argument that his message wasn't a man-made product of Jerusalem. It happened the way he said it happened through an encounter with Christ, confirmed miraculously, again and again, almost overwhelmingly, almost entirely, outside the confines and beyond the influence of Jerusalem. It's painstaking, but refuting BS is painstaking. It takes an order of magnitude more to refute it than it does to cook it up in the first place, and I am here for it. More tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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