Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I'm sitting here on the first legitimately gloomy, rainy day of the fall. As I'm recording this, we're just a couple days out from Halloween. There's still gold aspen leaves and stuff out the window, but my tree in my yard is down to the last few leaves that are still hanging on. And my little buddy, my son, and I, we both picked a leaf and bet that that would be the last leaf to come off the tree. And his, to his credit, it's still up there. He picked wisely. There's only 50 leaves left total. His is still up there. Mine is still up there. I went strategic. I picked a little sucker branch coming off the bottom that I'll need to cut off in the spring. And I found one teeny tiny little leaf that looked like it was just glued to the tree. So I think I got a pretty good chance of winning this thing. But you know, the boy might surprise you. Do you hear it in my voice, though? The fallenness of the fall? And if you are hearing that, I will tell you that's just the tip of the iceberg, my friends. Dang. I have been going through a season. I'm tired. Uh I'm tired at the level of the heart and tired in my brain. I'm tired emotionally. It's nothing like there's nothing scandalous or anything. Just big, big transitions for me and my family. This stuff that I've been contending with, just a billion balls in the air and not being able to handle them all. And I told you a while back about YouTube, just I don't know what's going on. Throw in an election and everybody super mad at each other and everything. And I don't know. Swirl that all around. And it's a pretty potent cocktail emotionally for me right now. So that's where I'm at. And today it finally caught up with me. And there's no getting away from it. There's no hiding it from you. This is a daily podcast. You get whatever version of me you get on a given day. And there'll be no keeping that from coming through over the course of the next few minutes as we're talking. Likewise, and there is one here, there is no hiding the emotion that Paul feels in the letter that we're looking at right now. And today I find that reassuring. If it's okay for that to come through in the Bible, it's probably okay to have it come through in my silly little podcast from time to time as well. Paul is out and out hurt and angry and mystified and baffled by what he has heard is going on in the Galatian churches. Probably the churches of Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch, all churches he founded. The whole range of the emotions that he feels about hearing that they have so quickly deviated from the foundational stuff of what they believed, what they joyfully received from Paul. That emotion to him is pretty overwhelming. I almost feels like he's barely keeping it in check. As soon as it gets to the to what do I owe the pleasure part of the letter, it's on. We can tell this is going to be a really intense event and that there will be logic as well as some emotion involved. He says, I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and returning to a different gospel. Yesterday we talked a little bit about how one could almost from reading this letter make the case that the one who they have deserted is Paul, and that's kind of the case. But given the larger context, I mean, ultimately, who they're deserting is the God who called them. It's the God who forgives. It's the God who paved the way for them to have spiritual life, forgiveness of sins in God in a way that was actually accessible. As you work through the Bible, you figure out that there are two systems in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and both of those systems flow out of the grace and mercy of God. It's like the Old Testament is antithetical to the new or vice versa. They're pulling in the same direction, and the character of God, it doesn't change. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. The fancy people use the word immutable when they talk about the character of God. It never changes. In the Old Testament, God set up this whole system that basically demonstrates what it would take for you to earn right standing with God through adherence to the law. Now, the law is not single-faceted, it's not just naughty and nice. The law accounts for all the ways that humanity falls short of the standards of God, the glory of God. And so, of course, you got the naughty and nice. You know, don't kill people. Okay, well, most of us can get that one right, though. When Jesus fulfills that text in Matthew chapter five, he says, you've heard it said not to kill. And then he goes on, he's like, But I tell you, don't hate. Dang, well, okay, I cannot kill. I think I can probably make it through my life without doing that. I'm on a real hot streak right now. But not hate? Who um sometimes I get mad. Sometimes I get hurt. Maybe that's the larger temptation to hate even than mad. Sometimes I get scared. Maybe that's a larger temptation to hate. I think those two emotions can mingle. Dang, I don't know if I can handle my heart. I might be able to put parameters in place to make it so I can handle my behavior, but my heart? Sometimes that's a bit of an untamed beast. So Jesus even further fleshes out that aspect of the Old Testament law that says don't do bad stuff, do do good stuff, and takes it to the level of the heart. And anybody who might think they've got exemplary behavior built the best system of checks and balances and accountability to make sure they'd never do a naughty thing. As soon as they get to Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, they'd have to admit, like, oh well, dang, I can't do that. There's no parameters that can check my impulses or my invisible thought life or my knee-jerk reaction to things. I I guess I can't uphold the naughty and nice, good behavior, bad behavior, right and wrong stuff of the law. But that's just the beginning of what the Old Testament law includes. There's also stuff about simply the impurity of us being imperfect beings, living in a fallen world touched by imperfection, while God continues immutably and unchangeably in his perfection. So there's all this law and ceremony stuff that's really confusing the first time you read through the Bible, but the second pass through the Bible, it starts to make more sense. There's all this stuff about clean and unclean, and all of this stuff about ceremonial preparedness to in any way be in the presence of God. And then you got all this law about how you treat other people, and then Jesus expands on all of this, not to make more rules, but to further demonstrate the inability of the individual to will themselves into obedience to it. And the takeaway coming out of the Old Testament, like we talked about when we did Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther in the last couple seasons, is this isn't going to work. We get the best try we can get at getting all the parameters under control with all the resources needed, having learned all the lessons of the Old Testament, and ultimately sin, human failure, shortcoming, our own imperfection is just too much. We can't beat it, we can't defeat it. Yet the fact that the law is there in the Old Testament that was given by God to the descendants of Abraham. You know, some people act like it was this mean, cruel joke on God's part or like there was a different version of God in the Old Testament. And back then he was like, I care about these things. But in the New Testament, he's like, I don't even care about that stuff anymore. Now I care about these other things. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is the same God in the Old Testament as the New Testament. The law just points to Jesus. The law points to the inability of humankind to will themselves into being God, into being right and righteous and holy. We just don't have the capacity. It's not going to happen. And further, the existence of the law in the Old Testament isn't something to recoil from, but rather it's reflective of this immutable characteristic of God, which is his grace. The law is a good thing. There's nothing wrong with the law. I mean, the book of Hebrews talks about this right in the middle, very intensively. It's not like God just wrote a crappy law and then he was like, I'm an idiot. Ah, why do I keep starting these simulations and worlds and I try to make it work? And each time I try to write a better law that'll work better, that people can do, and that will make them righteous by their own effort, but every time I just screw it up and it's not a good enough law. Dang it! Well, I'll just try it again on the next round. I mean, it's not like that at all. God's law was great. He nailed it, just like he does everything. It's a very good law. It's perfect, it's reliable, it's reflective of his character. Jesus even affirmed the law. I mean, heck, he said he's the fulfillment of the law. The law was an act of grace, but humans couldn't even keep up their end of that very, very generous, benevolent bargain. I mean, if God is wholly righteous and people are not, I mean, God's free to just judge as much as he wants, but he was withholding his judgment in the Old Testament. And then you get to the New Testament. Having learned all of these lessons that we learn at the end of the Old Testament, Ezra and Nehemiah and all of that stuff, having learned, we tried everything, every solution to the human problem through human effort, we tried. It didn't work. The Old Testament begs for the New Testament. It begs for the perfect ceremonial fulfillment of the law. It begs for somebody to come along and be the perfect sacrifice for the sacrificial law and to fulfill that. It begs for somebody to come along and fulfill the civil law, the laws of right and wrong and obedience and ethics. Then Jesus comes along and does that. We've alluded to some of the ways that he does that in even the Sermon on the Mount in this conversation. It begs for someone to come along and fulfill the clean and unclean laws and make it so that people are fit to approach God. And Jesus fulfills that as well. In fact, it's the very next thing he does after the Sermon on the Mount is he demonstrates his authority over the clean and unclean stuff. Jesus' lock and key is the solution to the fulfillment of, the completion of everything the law is pointing to, including the character of God. So back to Paul and his emotional tone and his grumpiness and his herdedness. He's hurt and he's frustrated and he's shocked and he's sad. Because these people in these churches, they got it. They just had it. They understood the whole equation. They understood that there is no going back, that the old system has demonstrated that the heart of man has been found wanting, that humanity cannot keep up its end of the generous bargain God offers by his grace through the law, and it is going to take a righteousness apart from the law in order to have any hope of being right with God, for there to be any deliverance for anyone. And these guys got it. They understood it. And then a couple of jerks came along and just used basic guilt and self-righteousness and weird, controlly, culty fundamentalism tricks, some of the oldest tricks in the book. And Paul's friends, the people he nurtured, they fell for it. So Paul's mad. And I get it. But you know what? I'm not going to go through this whole season with you guys bashing the Galatians because I've fallen for it too. The Galatians are falling for a seductive, deceptively prideful, wrapped in false humility, age-old trick that seems to work really well on people, including me. So I think Paul's justified to be frustrated with them, but I'm going to hold that back just a little bit because I can kind of relate to them, and maybe some of you can as well. It is a beautiful rainy day, and I am glad that we got to spend a few minutes together talking about important things and maybe pulling back the curtain just the tiniest bit on some of what's going on in my head. All the trend lines are pointed in the right direction. I really am encouraged about where we are as a family and kind of getting through just a logistically difficult, burdensome time that we have been going through. But thank you for taking a few minutes with me today to just let me kind of spell that out. I know it's not the most entertaining content, but I'm grateful for you giving me a few moments to share a little bit of that as well. All right, I'm going to wrap it up there. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.