I think it's fun the way that over the last hundred and fifty-ish years, every decade has been posthumously described as having a certain vibe to it. And it really hasn't been very hard once the emotional dust settles for historians and sociologists to look back on a decade and say, yeah, this is kind of the thing. The emotion, the national mood that characterized that in the United States or the West or wherever. If I throw out a decade, it's really easy for you to be like, oh, this is how things were back then. You know, like the 1920s. How were things in the 1920s? I mean, you can picture it, you can almost hear the music, right? It was post-war, Warren G. Harding returned to normalcy. We're going to party. And even though booze is outlawed, wink wink, there's still going to be plenty of booze and boardwalk empire and al Capone and all of that kind of stuff. But then if I say picture the 1930s, what are the defining traits of the 1930s? Well, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and FDR trying to put it back together. And okay, well, let's do the 1940s. World War II, we got to come together. We got to unify. We're going to dig ourselves out of our economic problem. We're going to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. We're going to give the Nazis the whole nine yards. And then the 1950s. Again, very easy to picture the national mood, the vibe, the things that characterized it. It's Leave It to Beaver. It's the advent of the suburbs. It's everybody coming home from the war and we're going to oppose communism and we're going to start looking towards space and the future. And we're going to have kids and we're going to settle down and we're going to build interstates and we're going to make a great country here. And then the 1960s, you can picture the vibe there. No, we're going to reject that. We're sick of war. We've done enough of that. We're not going to go invade other places. We're going to protest. A whole new generation of young people are coming along. We don't like our parents very much, and we're going to fight back against their ideas. 70s, same things. You can you can picture the 80s. You can picture the national mood. Well, what is it in the 20s? What will be the thing that is the vibe of the 2020s? As I'm recording this, we're still in the 2020s, and maybe this is not yet determined. Maybe passions are too high to really know, but I would like to submit a theory to you right now, a prediction for what I think the vibe of the 2020s is going to be when it's taught in history books 30, 50, 100 years from now. I think it's going to be the age of the authority crisis. As I look around, people across the political, social, economic spectrum, they are all very skeptical of the formerly stabilizing forces that told us how the things were. The first to go was probably the church. Maybe advertising, I think maybe advertising became a joke first that just talking through a radio or through a TV doesn't automatically make whatever you're saying true. And after a couple generations of being advertised at all the time, people started to realize I don't think nine out of ten dentists actually went and tried out that toothpaste. I don't think they went and asked a bunch of moms, and nine out of ten said they liked that kind of bread for their kid. I think this is all just a lie. And then after that, Christianity again really kind of across the spectrum in the 90s and 2000s, really imitated a lot of those techniques from television and media. And I think that's part of the reason that the church lost credibility, at least in my country and my culture, as an organization that could speak confidently about right and wrong into the larger culture. Maybe that's starting to change now. And then after that, it was the government that was next to go. After 9-11, it took a few years for people to catch on, but a whole lot of the governmental norms got violated. A lot like the late 100s BC in the Roman Republic. Once that ball starts rolling of violating norms and expectations that aren't necessarily enshrined in law, but this is just how you do statecraft. Once that starts happening, everybody gets involved from all sides and things get weird and unrecognizable. And that kind of happened in the 2000s and 20 teens, and I think there was an erosion of trust that the government necessarily had everybody's best interest at heart, or that they tell the truth to their citizenry, finding out that despite the existence of the Fourth Amendment, that the government spies on all Americans and has given themselves the non-constitutional right to go through electronic communication. Dang. I don't I think that sent shockwaves through the trust societally that people had in government. Then the next thing to go was the media. People figured out that news media was overwhelmingly there to get clicks and for entertainment purposes. And it became less about reporting things that are happening and more about figuring out what would get views and catering to one side or the other. And people figured out the media is, you know, each outlet is just kind of an extension of a given political party. Ugh, well, it's I mean, might be interesting to watch, but you can't watch it credulously. You know, this is mostly lying and framing pitches. And then after that, you had the pandemic, and I am not even gonna try to pull on that thread and sort out what people ought to think about it, but I will say this for sure. Prior to that, science was viewed as sort of this altruistic truth. I believe in science. And science is greater than all other things, all other opinions. It's this cold analytical way to look at the world, it's the most virtuous way to look at the world. But as things continue to pan out and we get further from it, though it may have been with the best of intentions, the science missed on a pretty good percentage of things involved in the pandemic and maybe hit on another pretty good percentage. But the level of certainty with which people spoke, some of those things that people said, like I am the science, or the one lady who was running New Zealand who said, We are your lone source of truth, like that kind of stuff sends epistemological shock waves through society. People remember those kind of things. You better be right if you say something like that. It's kind of like saying, Thus saith the Lord, if you're in a religious setting, and then being only mostly right or partially right, it really erodes trust in the thing. Look, I'm not trying to pick on anybody or be mean or pick a fight about anything political. I'm trying to give a cold analysis of the situation and to help us understand that the world we live in right now is very different than the world that the Galatians, who were the recipients of this letter from Paul that we've been looking at, lived in. And I don't just mean politically, like, oh, we don't have Rome and they had Rome. No, no, no. I mean their brains were different. I mean, they were in a different place, a different vibe moment. They were in a place of a different relationship with truth and how you know something is true than the one we're in. We're in an age of tremendous skepticism. I don't know how this is gonna end up after the 2020s. There is an epistemological authority crisis. Epistemology, by the way, that just means how you know stuff. There is a how you know stuff authority crisis that I think is gonna be the defining characteristic of the 2020s when people look back. That was not the case for the people that Paul is writing this letter to. They weren't like us in that regard. Rather, they were in a place where if they were attached to Judaism or Christianity in any way in the mid-first century AD, it had been very clear that Jerusalem is the headquarters and Jerusalem is where truth about the God of Abraham flows from. There was no crisis. There was nowhere else to point your eyes. If you wanted authoritative talk about the issues concerning God and Judaism and the Old Testament and Jesus, you turned your eyes toward Jerusalem, where it all happened. The city of David, the city where Jesus was crucified, the city where Jesus rose again, the city where the first temple was built and destroyed, the city where at the time that this letter was written, the second temple had been built and expanded by Herod the Great. It would only be a few years after this that that temple would come tumbling down. And at that point, I do think we run into a new authority crisis. And I think a lot of the people from back then would find our time more relatable and we would find their time more relatable after the temple got destroyed in 70 AD. But in Galatians, we're still before that. The idea that Jerusalem is still the headquarters of Christian thought and thought about God and theology would still be heavily present here. And if we understand that that was the mindset, then we're gonna understand this potentially confusing early part of the letter to the Galatian Church better. Clearly, religious people came from Jerusalem to these churches that Paul had founded in Galatia, and clearly they made some sort of claim to authority saying we represent Jerusalem. We represent the headquarters of authority and knowledge. There is no higher authority location you could go to. Back when colleges had credibility, this would be like saying, we are Harvard scientists. Now I know a lot of you are like, oh, okay, uh LOL, whatever. Maybe some of you were still like, no, that brand still carries a lot of weight. But even 30 years ago, everybody would say things like, oh, West Pennington County Community College is the Harvard of community colleges in Western South Dakota. People would use that phrase all the time. Well, Jerusalem was even more authoritative than that. So these guys showed up. They said they were representatives from Jerusalem, and they said because of that, appealing to where they came from, they showed up and said, Paul's message is wrong. He's teaching you something that he picked up from us, and then he went out with it and he skewed it into something else. We are here to correct the record and get you back on track, speaking with the authority of Jerusalem. And we're going to show you very clearly where Paul got this message from us and then went and ran with it and did something different with it. And so we're here to restore order. Maybe Paul meant well with what he took from us and came up here and misrepresented to you, but he's wrong. The authority of Jerusalem behind us, we're telling you all that you need to become culturally Jewish and abide by the Old Testament law in order to truly be in right standing with God. Just believing in Jesus, like Paul said, is not enough. So what is on the other side of this initial movement of thought that we started talking about yesterday here in the book of Galatians is fundamentally a claim to authority, a claim to the highest authority that anybody could point to at this time in Christian history and Jewish history. And to me, it looks really clear that part of the message would have been yes, Paul did come here from us, and he took a message that belongs to us and he ran with it, and things got a little bit crazy. We're here to straighten that out. And look, if it was the 2020s and this happened here, oh my goodness, how would people respond? I mean, just picture Twitter, picture X. People would debunk it all the way to the level of insane conspiracy theories, and everybody would just immediately go to the four winds of thought. There would be no guiding authoritative source to make this thing in any way get sorted out or sifted through just be crazy. But in the moment and time in which Galatians is written, it's not like that. Paul can't just hand wave these people and be like, oh, you know, who cares about any of these Jerusalem claims or whatever? He has to contend with it. The intellectual authoritative gravity of the appeal that these interlopers have made back to Jerusalem, it has to be spoken to. And Paul is going to speak to it by pointing out all the different ways that the message did not, in fact, come from Jerusalem. The true gospel, Paul's gonna say, is from an authority that is far greater than the temple, or the people who hang out at the temple, or the intellectual ruling class of Jerusalem. This is much bigger than that, Paul is going to say. And I didn't get it from them. This gospel is not an intellectual product, an intellectual invention of Jerusalem. This is an entirely different category of thing. This is the truest, realist thing. It's bigger than any of those old authority structures. This is directly from God, supernaturally confirmed. And further, Paul's gonna say, you guys believed that. That is what you accepted in the first place. Don't go back to this old way of thinking. Podcasts live for a really long time, so I don't know how things are at whatever time you are encountering this, but as I'm recording it, we're in a pretty different head space in my country and my part of the world from the head space the Galatians were in. We're at an all-time high in terms of skepticism of authority and claims to authority, but the Galatians were at an all-time high in terms of belief and certainty that authority flowed out of Jerusalem, which made them very vulnerable to the claim that a counterfeit gospel, as long as it was attached to Jerusalem, could be real. Well, Paul's fixing to try to sort that out. More on that next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.