Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we're in the middle of a two-day conversation about historical Galatia and which Galatians in particular we're talking about when we talk about the book of Galatians in the Bible. And it's possible that what we've been looking at here in Acts chapter 13 and Acts chapter 14 is the beginning of the Galatian church that is in view in the book of Galatians. So I'm going to have Jeffrey play some music, and we're going to pick it up right where we left off yesterday. Well, the Gaatians eventually migrate down into modern day Turkey and they occupy north-central modern-day Turkey, or like the 12 o'clock, if you think of Turkey as like a clock. And they're there for a long time, but they maintain linguistic distinctiveness. They speak the trade language, which is Greek. That's why it would make sense to write Galatians in Greek, but they also have their ancient Gaulic tribal languages as well. So this is really a unique group of people here. And a few of those people and a few of their customs migrate south into the southern half of the hourglass-shaped province of Galatia. And there's a less pronounced historically ethnic Gallic presence in the towns that we just looked at that the first missionary, the Prove It Journey, went through, that being in Pisidian Antioch, Derby, Lystra, Iconium. These are still Galatian cities in terms of the province of Galatia, but ethnically the presence of the historic Gauls here is not as pronounced. So it's kind of like if you go clear up to northern Italy, everybody speaks German and they got German Christmas markets up there, and it just looks like the German or Austrian Alps. There's still Italian stuff. But if you just dropped into Balzano, Italy out of a plane, your first guess would not be Italy. Your first guess would probably be something more Germanic. But you're still very much in the political region of Italy, in northern Italy. If you can picture the situation in northern Italy, then you can picture what's going on with this hourglass. It's all Galatia in terms of a Roman province. The northern half is historically, ethnically, culturally, linguistically, tribal Galatia. And we don't know for sure that Paul ever even made it up there. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. If so, probably on the second missionary journey. The southern half of the hourglass, where we are with all of these things, and where people tried to say that Paul and Barnabas were gods and tried to sacrifice to them, and then we're like, oh, well, okay, if you don't want sacrifices, then here's a sacrifice of rocks. We'll just stone you and your dumb heads until you look basically dead and drag you out of the city. All of that stuff happened in the southern half of the hourglass. So there's a little bit of Gallic culture and language there, but mostly it's going to be more Greekish there, even though it still has the title Galatia. Are you picking up what I'm putting down? What I'm saying is it is possible that you and I have just read through the chunk of the Bible over the last few days where Paul established the Galatian churches to whom he is writing the book of Galatians. That is an increasingly popular opinion over the last hundred and fifty years, and I tend to lean that way. But historically, dating back to when people had a little bit more of a natural sense of who lived where and what different parts of the Roman world felt like culturally, back then, well, people were more likely to say, oh, well, if you're talking about Galatia, nobody's talking about the southern half of the hourglass. You'd be talking about where the Gauls live. And the Gauls, by the time this stuff is going down, I mean, they'd been there as long as the English have been in the United States of America. It was pretty well established at that point. So the old theory is that Galatians is written to the northern half of the hourglass, and we don't really know much about those people, and we don't really get an account of how those churches were founded. The more recent theory that I find to be more compelling is that it's written to the southern half of the hourglass, where there's a little bit of Gallic culture, but it's definitely inside the boundaries of Galatia, the province. And ultimately, I don't think I'm going to be able to settle it. I mean, we'll see as we go along. I don't write the whole season in advance. I'm going to learn along with you as we go. So we'll keep putting things on either side of the weights, the level, the ledger here, and see what conclusions we might arrive at at the end. But it's very important for me to pause and note right now as we wrap things up in this first missionary prove it journey, that there's a really decent chance of what we just saw is the founding of the church that Paul is going to be writing to in the book of Galatians. The Okie dokie. So bearing all of that in mind, let's finish out this prove it journey, this first missionary journey. We're going to pick it up, leaving Lystra, where things got pretty bad, and everybody's like, oh, you guys are gods. You're the best. And they're like, no, we're not. And they're like, okay, then we're hitting you with rocks until you're dead. If you won't be our gods, jerks, then it almost works. It looks like they almost managed to kill Paul, but ultimately he and Barnabas regroup and they leave for Derby, Acts 14, 21. Derby is another town in the southern part of the hourglass. All of this is in the southern part of the Galatian hourglass. Here we go. They preached the good news in that city that's Derby and won a large number of disciples. Then they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch.
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SPEAKER_00Just gluttons for punishment. So this is an important little geographical note here. On this prove it journey, this first missionary journey, they retraced their steps. So Paul, in the future, if he was saying, Oh, the second time I visited you, there in Lystra, for example, if Paul were to say that, he could easily be talking about still the first trip and say, When I came back through, that would be the second time he visited, just worth noting. So they went to all those places. They strengthened the disciples and encouraged them to remain true to the faith. We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God, they said, turning the page. Paul and Barnabas appointed elders for them in each church, and with prayer and fasting committed them to the Lord in whom they had put their trust. That's verse 23 of Acts 14. Very important detail right there, because that's part of that cycle I was telling you about, right? They go to a town, they talk to the Jews and the synagogue, some of them like it, some of them don't. The Gentiles are often very into it, and then resistance comes in, sometimes violent resistance. Then Paul, with whatever time he has left, he establishes elders, establishes a church, and he's on his way. And then the letters that make up the rest of the New Testament, so many of those are just him writing back to churches that he helped found, and to the leaders of those churches who he helped put in place, because they all became Christians when Paul was there. Old Christians, it was all brand new, dew still on the grass, fresh and minty. And really, in a way, it was kind of a miracle that any of these churches survived at all. I mean, this seems like a crazy way to go around spreading Christianity, yet so often it seems to have worked. After going through Pisidia, they came into Pamphylia. We're still in the bottom part of the hourglass of the Roman province of Galatia. And when they had preached the word in Perga, they went down to Atalia, Atalia, I still don't know. From Atalia, they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed. There we go, the prove it mission, the prove it contract is now over. It went pretty well. Paul and Barnabas, no doubt, when they got back, everybody at Antioch was like, Oh, it's Paul and Barnabas. It's good to see you guys, but is it possible that you are more scarred, wounded, bloodied, and bruised than when I saw you? You look like you've aged about 10 years. Are you guys doing okay? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he got stoned basically to death, but we're fine. And on arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. There's your prove it. It wasn't just Paul and Barnabas on this trip. There were a lot of people, and they're all saying the same thing. We saw the same stuff. Peter's vision, the stuff that happened with Joppa and Cornelius, the Roman centurion, the Gentile. Yeah, it's all real. It keeps being confirmed. We're seeing this in the field. We got boots on the ground. We went out and looked at it, and this is definitely happening. It's real. And apparently everybody's just excited about it in Antioch. Okay, this makes sense. Well, now we know for sure this is what's going on. More conversation needs to be had. But it's so good to have you guys home. This is great. And it says, and they stayed there a long time with the disciples. And that's the end of chapter 14. And now, you remember a couple days ago we talked about after a one-year prove it deal, if indeed the player goes out and proves it, well, now you got to come back to the table and talk about what that means and how we move forward together. And that is what Acts 15 is going to be about. So there we have it once again. There's a decent chance the story that we just wrapped up right there is the story of the founding of the Galatian churches that we're reading about in the book of Galatians. And if so, I mean if that's the story that is in the background of all of that, wow, it's pretty dramatic, and it'll probably come into play as we read through the book. All right, that was a fun couple of days. Acts 15 is next, and then I think we hit the hyperdrive, and we're pretty much gonna fly through the rest of Acts, massive overview style, and then we're into the book of Galatians proper pretty quick here. Couple final notes. One, I still haven't figured out the YouTube thing. It's very weird. I don't know what's going on there. I'm talking with people who are smarter than me about what we do about that. Might have to start a new channel. I don't know. It's okay, it's the internet, whatever. I really like the video we made. I'm really grateful for all of the kind feedback I got from you. We'll figure out what we're doing and I'll let you know as it comes into focus. Thank you though, again, for all of the encouragement on that. That's been kind of a goofy situation. And then the final, final, final thing is that yesterday when I was giving you the whole hypothetical asking you to envision the trip that I took with my family during the Bush administration to the park in New York, I told you to close your eyes. And last night I'm laying in bed and I'm like, oh no, this stretched out into a two-part episode. Did I remember to tell them to open their eyes? Because that would be really bad. I hope you just took initiative. If I didn't, and you were like, I'm opening them. This is stupid. I don't have it's a podcast. I don't have to do any of this. If not, wow, I respect your commitment. You should probably open those now. Matt, this is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.