When I was in Mrs. Springer's fourth grade class at Cardinal Elementary School in McCoquata, Iowa, she did a whole day on how to write a letter. And I remember we got started on that. I was like, why do we need a whole day on this? You just say dear, whoever, and you write whatever you're gonna write, and then you just say sincerely, and then you put your own name and then XOXO XOXO at the end, and everything's great. But it turns out Mrs. Springer thought there should be a whole lot more things in a letter whenever you write a letter. She wanted there to be a header and a footer. She wanted you to identify yourself before the letter even started. So you had to put your address up there at the top, and then you had to put who the letter was going to be written to right after that. A lot of stuff before you even got into what the letter is actually going to be about. And then after all of that, you would say, dear so-and-so, or to so-and-so, or to whom it may concern. And she had names for all of these parts and broke it down. We had to pass a quiz on all of this. And I passed it. I thought the whole thing was frankly a little overwrought. I still maybe think that. But the one advantage that I've gained from Mrs. Springer's fourth grade class and all that she taught me about how letters work is that when I see a letter, I tend to know pretty quickly there's a letter. And when I open the Bible to the book of Galatians, there's no question in my mind as to what I'm looking at. Mm-hmm. It's got all the hallmarks right there. It's a letter. And the very first word of the letter is who is writing the letter? Paul, an apostle, sent not from men nor by man, but Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead and all the brothers with me. Okay, that's actually that's a pretty long who wrote it line. When Mrs. Springer had me write letters, she would usually have me just put Matt there, or maybe Matt W with the period after the W. Or maybe if it was really fancy, like I was pretending to write to the president, it would say Matt Whitman. But I don't think I think I there would have been a red mark. I would have got in trouble if there were that many words in the who wrote it line. But I think there's a point here at the beginning of Galatians that this Paul fellow is trying to make. And pretty clearly the point is it's not just me. I was chosen by God to do this thing and to talk about this kind of stuff. And all the Christian brothers and people who God also called, they're all with me on this one, too. So don't imagine you're getting a letter from a guy. You're kind of getting a letter from Christianity here. I'm just the one who's gonna dictate the letter. And because of the way the Bible operates, I think it's really easy to let the opening line like this in these letter books of the New Testament just sort of slide by and you don't really catch it. But imagine you're receiving this letter. And as an individual or an institution or organization, you get a letter and it's from Paul. You're like, oh dang, that's like one of the three or four most important people in the whole religion right now. That's kind of a big deal. You know, Paul, I would definitely open it if it said Paul. Peter, I'd open it for him. John, I would want to know what that said. But also apparently this letter is commissioned by God, and all the Christians who are on the other side of this letter also agree. Okay, so there's authority behind this. We are then probably intended, as secondary audience members reading this letter, we're probably intended to take this pretty seriously. Now, I know that there are many of you who are part of this conversation who do not believe in God, or you are in a place that maybe the fancy people call agnosticism, just not sure what to make of it. Totally get that. Love that we get to hang out together. And you might not at this point in your life share the assumptions that this book of the Bible does. But if we're going to read this book of the Bible on its own terms, we got to understand that the whole Bible holds itself out as being from God and as being authoritative in that regard. So if a Christian or a person who believes in God picks up Galatians as they're reading through their Bible and it says all of this, it means that just this opening, you know, throwaway fragment of a letter that Mrs. Springer said was important that I've often ignored. It just means this opening part, the part about who is sending it, really says a lot about how seriously you are supposed to take it as the reader. And this is kind of from God. So we're supposed to take it seriously, but at the same time, it isn't addressed to me because the next line is the address line. It's to the churches in Galatia. Well, I've never been to Galatia. I don't go to church in Galatia. I mean, people have been dead for a long time. Can you even still go to church in Galatia? So what am I supposed to do with that? Well, that's really one of the conundrums of the entire Bible is that the Bible holds itself out as being inspired by God, kind of incarnationally, through human authors who God did not dictate to. I mean, there's some like prophecy and quotes of God, tell the people I said this kind of things in the Bible. But for the most part, it's people inspired by God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to write stuff down in a way that would make sense to the original audience, and in a way that clearly preserves the personality and the perspective of the author, and in a way that is clearly still aware of the moment in which it is written, but also it's timeless. Because if it actually is from God, and again, I know not everybody here believes the same thing about that, but I do think it's from God. So if it's actually from God and it's authoritative, then this is God talking to people then, even if I'm a secondary member of the audience and I'm just kind of eavesdropping on this, I mean, yeah, I'd still want to have my antenna out for that. I mean, how many of us would love to hear something from God? And if you had God appear miraculously and say something, even something you didn't really understand, you'd think about that for a long time. You'd pour over those words in your brain again and again and again and again. And that's the basic premise of the whole exercise here with a book of the Bible, with a book like Galatians. Yes, it is obviously and overtly a letter written from one party to another party. Neither of those parties are alive at this point. The circumstances that were being dealt with for better or worse all got resolved many, many, many, many, many, many years ago. But yet we have this little snapshot, this little moment that we look at here, and these clues that Mrs. Springer taught me to look out for, you know, they've tipped me off to knowing that this is a letter, and that's gonna kind of frame up how we interpret it and think about what we do with it as we read along. So, just as is the case with any letter that we would read that wasn't addressed to us, but that it was appropriate for us to read, we got to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else in order to understand it. Who are we supposed to put ourselves in the shoes? Oh, okay. Well, the churches in Galatia. Where is that? Now, we've been working on this season for 40-ish episodes. We did a flyover of the book of Acts and some New Testament history stuff to try to get us up to a point where we'd have a sense of all the tensions and where we're at in the history of the church so that we would understand this letter better. However, I know that a bunch of you are jumping in right now at this episode because some of you like the preamble background history stuff. For some of you, you're just like, yeah, just get me to the text of the letter. Let's go. I'm gonna start with this episode. In light of that, the quick version of what we know about the audience is that Galatia was a province in what would be modern day Turkey. It was right in the middle of modern day Turkey, and it's kind of an hourglass-shaped province. Very interesting. You don't see a lot of these. Now, this Roman province is a political entity with a Roman governor in place, but it also corresponds to a historic geographic region that predates the Roman occupation. And it's named Galatia because of the Gauls, like people from France, who migrated east and invaded here and settled here, and their language and their culture was still present in Galatia. It was more present historically, like their central old school stomping grounds were more the north half of the hourglass, which is up toward northern modern-day Turkey near the Black Sea, but some of their culture and language was still around in the southern half of the hourglass, which is in the southern half of Turkey, nearly coming all the way down to border the Mediterranean Sea. We know for sure that Paul had a home away from home. He had love in his heart for four cities in the southern half of the hourglass, that being Lystra, Derby, Iconian, and Pisidian Antioch. Things didn't always go well when he visited there, but there were churches in these places. He picked up some key allies in these places, and every single time Paul went out on a missionary journey, he stopped by these places. So it would make sense then that he would shoot them a letter if those churches found themselves in a difficult spot. So a lot of people think that when it says to the churches in Galatia, we're just referring to churches in mostly those four towns, Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pasidian Antioch, in the southern half of the hourglass-shaped Roman province of Galatia. Those churches were all founded on the first missionary journey of Paul, very early in his career. There are some people who were smart and have good reasons who make the case that this is written to some churches that we don't hear about in the book of Acts, but that must have been founded on Paul's second missionary journey. The more I read about this and think about it, the more I pour over Galatians and Acts, the more I tend to think that this letter was written to Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Poseidon Antioch in the southern half of the hourglass. But I don't know for sure, and I'm still learning and figuring this out as I go along. So we'll just work on that question together as we grind through the book of Galatians together. Either way, we know that this letter was written by Paul, that he's writing it, and he wants to amass this gigantic weight of authority behind him. He wants to make it clear. This isn't just some guy, this is kind of Christianity writing to you here. So we can tell before we even get out of the address line that there is a big crisis going on. And part of the plan that Paul has to solve the crisis is to swing around the authority here to say, like, this isn't a matter of opinion. Everybody's in agreement with this. The people I'm writing you to tell you are wrong, they're wrong, and in opposition to Christianity and God and me. It's not too hard to read between the lines when somebody points out the resume that much and they're trying to demonstrate authority. So we know that. And we also know that this letter is written to people of either direct ethnic Gaelic descent or cultural Gallic descent who have received the gospel of Jesus, have become Christians and been a part of establishing these churches. But they're on difficult times, and that comes into focus a little bit more as we read the next few lines. You and I are not from Gaul. You and I do not know Paul personally, but there's going to be a ton to be gained in terms of understanding historic Christianity and I believe God by reading this letter from Paul to this church. And we'll keep chipping away at what he has to say to them next time around. But before we do that, I need to say thank you to Mrs. Springer for teaching me about how letters work because it kind of came in handy here. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.