Hello, my friends. It's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are looking at the book of Galatians right now. I know pretty much every day somebody new is jumping in here. So if you're new, welcome. This is a great day for you to jump in because you're getting a little reset on the front end of this for what we've done so far this season. For those of you who've been here for a while, this is only going to take a minute, but I think it's going to be very helpful for what we're going to talk about today and maybe tomorrow as well. Okay, here we go. Christianity starts with Jesus and his disciples up north in Galilee, and then it moves down to Jerusalem, and the whole thing takes shape as Jesus has his confrontation toward the end of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with the religious leaders of the day. Ultimately, the Jewish religious leaders and the Romans work together to have Jesus executed on the cross. But just like he said he was going to do, he comes back to life three days later, appears to a whole bunch of people, commissions his followers to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Boom, there you go. Now Christianity is happening. But Jesus didn't view Christianity as other than the Old Testament. He said authoritatively that he didn't come to abolish the law and the prophets on the Old Testament stuff. He came to fulfill it. So the disciples are going out with that assumption, but the Jewish religious leadership are viewing this as an upstart religion, a cult, some sort of perversion of their thing. And so as soon as Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father in Acts chapter 1, just real quick after that, the Holy Spirit shows up at the day of Pentecost and a whole bunch of people become Christians. Now early on, these converts are overwhelmingly, maybe almost exclusively, Jewish people who recognize Christ as the long-promised Messiah and as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. They're excited about it. And they go to the far reaches of the world where there are all these little Jewish enclaves set up as a result of all kinds of movements and history of empires coming and going and this and that. And they tell other Jewish people there, and followers of Christ, little pockets of these communities, start popping up all over the classical Mediterranean Roman world. This is very interesting. Well, the home office that had Jesus put to death, they get very upset about this. And Jesus' disciples are still sitting right there. So they start hauling them in and interrogating them and occasionally flogging them, but it doesn't work. They can't get these guys to shut up about Jesus, and more and more people are following Jesus. And so eventually they make an example of a guy named Stephen, a follower of Jesus, by hitting him with rocks until he's dead without even getting Roman approval. And one of the key guys who's there to do it is a dude named Saul. Later he'll be known as Paul. And this causes the disciples of Jesus to largely disperse. Now they are going out from Jerusalem to Judea, that's the larger region, Samaria, a neighboring region, and out to the ends of the earth. And as the they get further from the home office of Judaism, they're running into more and more Gentiles. And increasingly it starts to look like the Gentiles are signing up for this, and all the same miraculous confirmation that was coming from the Holy Spirit for the reality of the conversion of the Jews. Well, that same stuff is happening with the Gentiles. Peter himself, one of the three really giant leaders of the earliest days of the church, he has a vision from God and a miraculous experience right after that, whereby a Roman occupier and his household, very, very much Gentiles, become Christians. He then goes back and explains this to the Christian headquarters in Jerusalem. And they're like, yeah, I think that's legit. And in the meantime, Saul has had a conversion encounter with Jesus, and he's completely flipped. Now he is on Team Jesus, and he starts to partner up with a church up the road from Jerusalem in Antioch, and they start sending Saul, who becomes known as Paul, out into the larger Gentile world, and they're like, I think this is for the Gentiles. Let's go make sure. And sure enough, a whole bunch of people who aren't Jewish become followers of Christ, receive the Holy Spirit, miraculous confirmation everywhere, and all these little churches start to crop up that are left behind after Paul visits a given area with the gospel. Well, now everybody has to get back together back in Jerusalem to make sure we're all on the same page. And sure enough, all of the leaders of the early Christian church, at this point, all of these key leaders are all Jewish Christians, they all agree. The gospel's for everybody, the message is for everybody. We got different people with different talents and skill sets who are positioned in different ways to go to different people, but we're all on the same page. Go get them, boys. And all of that happens in Acts chapter 15, and they spread out. And this really, I mean, it's there's a little bit of centralization here with the Jerusalem thing, but overwhelmingly, this is a pretty decentralized movement. These churches are scattered to the four winds of the ancient world, but yet they're all founded on the same gospel message. That Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament law, that the Old Testament law reveals the character of God. It also points to the ultimate fulfillment of that law, who again is Christ, and there is a forgiveness of sins, a righteousness from God that is needed to be right with God, that only exists apart from the law, a righteousness that is greater than human effort or human merit. It is a gift from God bought by the work of Christ on the cross and in his resurrection, and the forgiveness of God and right standing with God, justification before God can only happen through Christ. And this gift is available to people from everywhere, people who look all different ways, speak all different languages, men, women, slave, free, rich, poor, everybody. It really is the first global movement of anything that has ever happened, and is still the greatest global movement of anything that has ever happened, especially because it did not happen at the tip of the sword. There was no government, there was no meaningful money, there was no power behind this thing other than the power of the message, other than the power of God. But Jesus said repeatedly there would be resistance to this. The book of Acts says repeatedly and shows repeatedly, there's going to be resistance to this. The rest of the New Testament says there's going to be resistance to this, and there is resistance to it in a bunch of different forms. There is opposition from within the church with internal heresies, people preaching deviant things about who Jesus is and what his message was, and there's opposition that comes from the outside, first from the ilk of the violent Jewish religious leaders who want to persecute Christians, and then eventually also from secular government forces, initially the Romans. In the book of Galatians, we are looking at a letter that was written by Paul to a group of churches he founded probably very early on in his missionary journeys, and this was a letter that was meant to be read aloud to vigorously correct them and cure them of a soul-endangering error that they were making. This wasn't a taste error, this wasn't a cultural differences error, this wasn't a linguistic barriers error. This was a fundamental error to what makes Christian faith Christian faith. And the error they were making, which is to say, we are going to ostensibly acknowledge Jesus, but really we're going to put our hope for salvation in our strict adherence to the Old Testament law. This error fundamentally just redefines what religion they're practicing and who they are. So Paul's going to go after it really, really hard. And this letter was going to be read aloud at each of these churches. How many churches were there? Well, I don't know. We know probably of at least four: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derby. It's possible that there are other Galatian cities, maybe up in the north of the region of Galatia that Paul visited later and churches were founded there. Maybe that's who he's writing to, but I'm generally assuming that he's writing to those four cities that I just told you about that we know he visited multiple times in the province of Galatia. So each of these churches is going to have this letter read to them aloud. And really, three groups are going to be present at each of these churches for the public reading of this document. Group number one are going to be the people who are on the side of the gospel that they received initially and the one that they rightly accepted. They're going to be on the side of the Apostle Paul. It's going to be difficult for them to keep the smug look off of their faces as they are vindicated by the big dog stepping in and saying how the things actually are. That's going to be their social challenge in the whole thing. There's also going to be the people who are the opponents of Paul who are there, either the ones who initially came and sowed the dissent in these churches or the people who quickly adopted what those dissenters and agitators, Paul's word, not mine, inflicted upon the church. Their big challenge is going to be to sit through the entire thing without stomping out and to have the humility to admit that they're wrong as soon as they realize that they're wrong instead of trying to justify themselves somehow in front of everyone and make the whole situation worse. The third group of people who are going to be there for the reading of this letter are the people who don't have any idea what the heck is going on. People who don't think in deep theological categories, this isn't the easiest for them. They know it's important and they're trying, but this just isn't how their brains wired. And they don't want people to fight at church and they miss how beautiful this was in the early days before this fight got introduced, and before there were teams and sides, and they just want it to be over, but also they want to get it right. They don't want to believe things that are wrong about God. They want to believe things that are true and right, and they don't feel great about what's going on, but they don't really have the power of personality or persuasion or words to really nudge things in one direction or the other. They're kind of the sheep, they're the squishy middle. This is the same structure as we get throughout the book of Matthew in the Gospels. There's always three parties present and in view in all of the conversations and all of the teachings of Jesus. In the Gospels, you have the disciples, those are the people who are bought into the teachings of Jesus. You have the enemies, those are usually the religious leaders, and then you've got the squishy middle, the people who don't quite know what to make of it. They're not early adopters, they want to lick their finger and put it to the wind because of their personality or how vested they are in other things, and they're afraid they might lose something, but they're open to being persuaded and could be people who could be awakened and activated for really meaningful, powerful things, but right now they're squishy. That dynamic that we get in the gospels of those three parts of the audience is gonna look the same way with the public reading of this letter across the board. And I took today to kind of reset this because as we get into the body of this letter of Galatians, it's gonna be really easy for us to get lost and divorce this whole thing from the actual circumstances of the letter and the actual circumstances of the reading of the letter and what the room would be like. Paul knew far better than I know the whole history that we just quickly covered in this conversation. He had that on lockdown. The audience who he's writing to, they all knew that. Everybody in the room, with bated breath, in suspense, waiting to hear what this letter was going to sound like, read aloud, they all knew this history as well. I mean, maybe they had a competing version of this history introduced by the agitators. We'll think that through as we go along. But further, Paul, who is dang good at writing letters, more people have read his letters than the letters of any other person in all of the history of ever. He is the most well-known, well-read, widely read letter writer in all of time. Paul, who is very good at writing letters, knew exactly what the social dynamic was there, and he knew exactly who the three parties were he was writing to there, and we're gonna hear him appealing to and firing shots at, turning phrases and making points that are meant to appeal to different parts of that audience at different times. And again, if we don't bear that in mind, this is just gonna become sort of this ethereal exercise in thinking vaguely about spiritual things divorced from any tangible reality or circumstances. And I don't think that's the best way to read the letter. Another reason that we do this today is because as we move into the next chunk of this letter, we're getting half of the conversation. We're gonna see Paul responding to something. We started to see that yesterday. The intonation that Paul was trying to please men and not speak the truth had clearly been made, and Paul is refuting that. He's firing back at that. And so this is gonna be some really interesting Bible slash letter reading over the next several days, weeks of conversation, because there's gonna be a whole bunch of little hints that tell us what had been said, and those hints are gonna be what Paul is responding to. And I think we can piece back together the other side of this letter, the other side of this conversation as we go along. Fun, fun, fun. I love this stuff. If you are new here, I'm so grateful that you are jumping in and giving this thing a shot. You can go back to the beginning of this season and get the really detailed version of all this stuff we talked about and a whole bunch of other things as well. Or I don't know, you just keep going with us from here. There's gonna be something for everybody, even if you are brand new every day. That's the way we try to build this thing. Thank you for giving it a shot. To all of you have been here forever. You're awesome. Thanks for doing this with me. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.