My grandpa was a marksmanship instructor, I guess a drill sergeant in the Air Force. I don't know. I hear my family use the term drill sergeant, but I don't totally know what that means. What I know is he was very gruff when it came to tasks. And I don't say that as a criticism. I love that man. I adore that man and I miss him so, so, so much. When he got sick and cancer, I drove up here. He lived by where I live now in the Black Hills. I drove up and we sat forever on that couch. He looked so beat up and so weak. And we talked and talked and talked, and his heart was so soft. He'd been such a tough guy, as we're going to talk about in a minute for so long. And the tenderness he showed to me, the blessings that he gave me were so powerful. And we got down and was like, I gotta go. I gotta drive back home. I have, you know, I gotta do life and family and work. I drove away, I started sobbing, and I was like, I'm just not ready, not ready to say goodbye, and I think this is it. So I turned around, I drove back, I came in, he knew exactly why I was back, and I sat and I hugged him, and I sat by him on the couch for hours more, and we talked about more things. I'm so glad I went back and never saw him again. But grandpa was he was wonderful. I didn't always appreciate it when I was a kid because he was tough because of the military thing that I was telling you about. He had this teaching method where he would assume this shtick, and maybe the shtick was how he taught people how to shoot at the rifle range at Ellsworth Air Force Base. I don't know. That's all I can assume. But he'd give me a task. Here's a thing that a young man needs to know how to do. Matthew, Marky Boy, come over here. That's what he called my little brother. All right, we go over there. We're like, we're kind of in trouble. We just want to like play around and not play games and not work on things. Although, sir, what did you want us to do? And he'd give us a task, and it'd be something crazy. Be like, field strip this rifle.
SPEAKER_02Like, uh, I've never really had a rifle before. I don't know if I would know how to field my mom says stripping is bad. So I better not do it. Field strip this rifle. And we'd be like, okay, does that mean take it apart?
SPEAKER_00And so we'd they're like on his porch. I'm not kidding. And he'd give us like an M1 grand or something. We're just taking the thing apart and we don't know what to do at all. And he'd just stand over our shoulder and he'd bark at us. And it was really intimidating, but also I think we could tell that he was playing and all these different tasks that he would give us, the things that a man should know how to do, that he would teach us. He would let us get to the dead end, or real close to it, he'd be like, That's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. And we'd be like, Okay, show us how. But he wouldn't show us how, he'd make us finish it all the way to the breaking point so that we would realize that won't work. It's not gonna do it. And then he would use the thing that wouldn't ultimately get us to the finish line to help us understand how to actually do the thing and what it would take to get to the finish line. All with this weird give me that stupid, stupid thing.
SPEAKER_01You gotta nope, nope, you take that, not there, not there, and then you put it over there. Now you see how that feels?
SPEAKER_00Okay, now, now try it. And he'd do that. And he was so satisfied when it would ultimately work, and so was I. And he scared me when he did that. He really did, and my mom was very concerned. I could see her pacing back and forth by the window in the living room, keeping an eye on her dad to make sure he wasn't too mean to her soft, soft little boys, but he wasn't, I don't think. Maybe a couple times he was too mean. But that teaching technique was good because everything I learned from him, I learned why my way wouldn't work. And then he would replace it with something that would actually get me where I was going. Likewise, I think that is what the occasionally gruff, sometimes bristly apostle Paul is doing throughout the whole New Testament. And I think Peter was doing it in the original A plot of the book of Acts as well. They all seem to be contrasting the Old Testament law of Moses with the forgiveness of Christ earned by the work of Christ in his death on the cross and in the resurrection. They all seem to be pointing out that the Old Testament law could only take the situation so far, that ultimately it was never going to be the perfect solution to human sin and regret, all the stuff that we talked about yesterday, that ultimately true righteousness, for us to have it, was gonna take something apart from ourselves, apart from our own behavior. Behavioral perfect righteousness is something humanity could never achieve. It's been tried for millennia, it's not gonna work. Instead, if there is to be a righteousness that makes people right with God and truly forgiven, that righteousness was going to have to come from God himself as a gift that he paid for. And that is the message that Paul just keeps pounding on all of these journeys he takes to tell people about Jesus. And every time he starts in the synagogues and he's telling Jewish people who would be intimately familiar with the Old Testament law about this, and he's also talking to Gentiles who might have vaguely heard about the Old Testament law. But really, it works whether you're a Jew or a Gentile. This message works, that is, because there are two things that Paul is pitting against each other. Thing number one is your own effort and attempt to self-justify, self-soothe, self-reconcile past problems and future capacity for evil and failure. You got the self-solution, which clearly does not work. Humanity, we've had a long time to work on it, but we cannot help ourselves. We cannot perfect ourselves. We cannot, through discipline or external control or accountability, get our hearts on a leash. And even if we could get the behavior right, we can't get the soul stuff right, the life of the mind stuff right. Sin is on us. We have a problem, and it's one we can't solve. So Paul is pitting the self-solution versus the external solution from God against each other. And he's saying, if those are your only two options, to be saved by your own effort or to be saved by a gracious God, to be forgiven by your own willpower, or to be forgiven effectively by a gracious God, there's no choice here at all. There's no comparison. It's not going to be by your effort, it's going to be by the work of God. So this is what he's referencing in Pisidian Antioch in Acts chapter 13, with this message that caused an otherwise inexplicable historical social event, an upheaval of the world as we know it, and human thought as we know it, that occurred with the message of Jesus first going out here in the middle of the first century A.D. in the New Testament. Paul says in Acts 13, 38, Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him, everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses. Just like my grandpa, you've been doing it this way, take it all the way to the end. You see why that doesn't work now? Cool. Do it this other way. Do you see why that works now? Now you've seen it for yourself. Now you've got it. Later on in life, Paul got connected up with Rome and developed a relationship with the church there. And he wrote them a letter that is just one of the jewels of the Bible. I mean, I don't know why I say stuff like that. I'm not going to criticize some part of the Bible and be like, yeah, it's not that good a part of the Bible over there. But Romans, that's one of the really good parts. It's all good. It's all good. But Romans is particularly rich in how it speaks to the topic you and I are discussing today. And in Romans 3, Paul, who wrote Galatians, who wrote Romans, who is on screen here in the book of Acts that we're looking at, he's talking about a bunch of this same stuff. And uh, where am I going to pick it up? I'm going to start in verse 9, Romans 3 9, dealing with the same material, he writes to the Roman Church, saying, What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all. We've already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written, there's no one righteous, not even one. There's no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they've together become worthless. There's no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves, their tongues practice deceit, the poison of vipers is on their lips, their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery mark their ways, and to the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes. And that's not just one scripture passage. Paul is grabbing things from Psalms and Isaiah, he's all over the place there, pointing out to the attentive reader that throughout the whole Old Testament that you all embrace, there is this theme of corruption, of the brokenness of humanity. And he's pointing out that there is a dead endiness to our own efforts to solve this problem. He goes on, and these are his words not a quote again. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. So there he's answering a really obvious question everybody would have. Well, then why even have a law? Well, the law points out the standards of God, the simplest level, and it points out the failure of humanity. It gives evidence to what is the spiritual state of humanity, and that is a resistance to God, a brokenness. These aren't my opinions, by the way. I guess they are. I mean, the world and what I've seen in it and in my own life, it backs this up. But this is, I mean, it's biblical theology. It runs through the whole thing, it's all over the place. So that's one of the reasons why there's a law. It points out that humanity is what humanity is, and that God is, and his standards are what God is and what God's standards are. He goes on, verse 20 of Romans 3. Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law. Rather, through the law, we become conscious of sin. Why did I just say all that stuff? The very next verse spelled it out better than I said it anyway. Whatever, we go on. Verse 21. But now, a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify. Dang, that's a good verse. That is such a spectacularly hope-filled verse. The first 20 verses of this passage are like, hey, things are bad. And maybe people would want to pridefully be like, no, they're not. That's you're being way too hard on people. But come on, look around. I know that it's really easy right now to be like, oh yeah, humanity can be bad, but it's just because of the other political party. And if it weren't for them, there wouldn't be problems because everything my team thinks is right. My news channel tells me so all the time. Come on, we're better than that. We see through that facade, right? We know that is horse crap. There's something damaged about all of us. And if either of our preferred nonsensical political parties had total control of everything and could do whatever they want, we know the heart of man would still be damaged. We know that evil would still abound. We know that crime would still occur, that people would violate other people, that selfishness would still happen. It is a ridiculous lie that we tell ourselves that those things are a problem of the undesirable others who think the wrong political thoughts. Nonsense. That nasty, oily film that makes the air and the turnaround spot and the stairwell reek is something that all of us have and all of our ideas have. We have not been able to purge that politically, nor will we ever be able to. We will not be able to purge that through our own effort, nor will we ever be able to. But after all of that bad news, there's this incredible pivot with the word but in verse 21. Now, a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known. So it's not hopeless. So there's something that's come along that involves actual forgiveness, actual hope, actual reason to believe that the human problem, including my contribution to it, could be resolved. Dang, let that sink in. Maybe you've heard it too much. Can you hear it too much? Maybe you've heard it so much that it's become relegated to another part of your brain where the awesomeness of what that is, which is kind of the punchline of the whole Bible, maybe the awesomeness of that just isn't sinking in the way it had. Maybe mark this episode and listen to it again after you've completely shanked something and you're embarrassed and overwhelmed with that gross feeling where you stare down the drain of the shower and watch the water swirl and feel regret. Maybe come back to it then. Maybe then this verse will hit. I no shame. It doesn't always hit for me either. For whatever reason, boy, does it right now as we are talking about it. This is the pivot point of the whole concept of everything about humanity and our relationship with God and hope and the Bible and forgiveness, all of it. There's now a righteousness from God apart from the law that has been made known. And it'd be really easy at that point for somebody to be like, uh, yeah, we're a multi-thousand-year-old religion already. Our God is named I am. He is the God that is essence and being. I don't think a lot of new things are happening. I'm immediately skeptical of whatever this innovation is that you're talking about. But what does Paul say next? That this righteousness from God, apart from the law that has been made known, it says, to which the law and the prophets testify. Paul knows what question they're gonna ask. He knew they were gonna raise that objection, that fear of something novel. And so what he points out is now this hope has been baked in from the very beginning. It's baked into the narrative of the garden. The serpent is gonna strike at the heel of the woman's offspring, but one is gonna come along who's gonna crush the head of the serpent. What does the serpent represent? All the destructive stuff, the character that brought about separation between God and man and all of the ugly things we've talked about for the last couple of days. Okay, well, this is exciting. Where do we get it? Verse 22. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. I think you're tracking with what's being written there, every objection that somebody might raise to this is being tackled. Well, I mean, so God isn't just, he's just going to forgive all the sins. Paul's saying, no, Jesus took the penalty for all of those sins. That justice was applied there voluntarily. So God is fully just, God is fully forgiving, God is fully loving. All of that comes through here. The Old Testament. Well, so what? We're just like none of that even mattered, all of the sacrifices and all of that. Why'd we kill all those animals? Nope. It all set up this. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice. The how did he say it? The sacrifice of atonement. There is no atonement by human effort. The movie Atonement tells that whole story beautifully that came out 20 years ago. Our own life stories say there is no atonement by human effort. You can kind of square up accounts, you can patch it up, you can slap flex seal tape on it and stop the leakage for a while, but ultimately, atonement is something that's owned by God, only he's in a position to give it. And Paul's point here, both in Acts 13 and over here in Romans 3, is praise God, he has been generous with this atonement. And he's made it possible, not just with some blowing off of the story, to be like, I just forget the whole story that we did. I know I said to be invested in it, but it's not working out, and nobody's gonna be good enough. It's gonna fail. My bad. Here, just here's a brand new story with a whole new thing. Believe this now. It's not like that. Paul's making it abundantly clear. Everything that happened before in the story you all already know was pointing to this, is fulfilled in this. And lest you think I'm just pointing to a bunch of Paul stuff, Jesus says the same thing about himself, and he says it right from the get-go in the book of Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount. He takes all of his disciples up on a hill, he teaches them about the values of the kingdom, and they're upside down and backwards from the values of the world we know, and it's all beautiful values. And then he gets through all of that stuff, and no doubt people's interest peaked, and they're like, Who is this guy? That did sound good, but we kind of already have a religion. How does this work? But then Jesus says famously in Matthew 5 17, don't think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Well, that's what Paul was just saying about Jesus over there in Romans chapter 3. That's what Paul was saying about Jesus over there in Acts 13. That the law and the prophets as an end.
SPEAKER_01Well, no, that's not gonna work. That now go ahead and take it all the way to the end, but it's not gonna work. You can't get right enough. It's not gonna work. Go ahead, Marky Boy. Go ahead, Matt. Give it a try. It's not gonna work.
SPEAKER_00But this other way, the Jesus way, that is the fulfillment of that, that's gonna work. So Jesus didn't say I came to wreck all of that, forget the story. Nope. This is the completion and the fulfillment of that story. But in this very long episode that I'm unwilling to split in two because I want the whole message that Paul's explaining that's making all of this stuff work. I want it all to be in one thing, I want it all to be in one place. Listen to how Jesus finishes out that thought, that he didn't come to abolish all the stuff that came before, but that he came to fulfill it. He goes on to say, I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of the pen will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished. I'm still in Matthew five here. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. So he's saying this law is still reflective of the character of God. This law is still reflective of the perfection of God, this law is still demonstrative of the inability of humanity to live up to the character of a perfect God. And no doubt at this point, people are on an emotional roller coaster with Jesus' speech. They're like, the values of your kingdom sound amazing. I want to be in that. That's true, that's real, I want that, but I already have a religion. And then Jesus is like, I I know, and this is the fulfillment of it. I am the fulfillment of what you the story you know and what you've practiced and what you've been told. And I'm not abolishing that law. Rather, the law is doing exactly what it's supposed to do in pointing to me and pointing to, as Paul said over there in Romans chapter three, the shortcomings of all of humanity. Again, this is how Paul said it. Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law. Rather, through the law, we become conscious of sin. Different words, but these two, I tell you what, they are very on the same page. Then, no doubt people would have felt despair after that last stuff Jesus said. Well, nobody can be a part of this beautiful kingdom, the truest, realist thing, unless we do everything written in the law. Like, Jesus, I honestly I've tried pretty hard and it isn't working. I haven't been able to. So am I just out? And Jesus teases this little doozy right here, verse 20. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. What's he driving at here? He's saying the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, they practically get to make the rules. They get to write the rules and interpret the law to make it work for them. You would have to do even better than that to, by your own merit, earn your way in with that system. What Jesus is doing here is he's taking it to the absolute end game, like grandpa did when he gave us a task and let us go all the way to the end of a way and approach to solving it that would never work. Go ahead. Oh, do it your way.
SPEAKER_01All right.
SPEAKER_00It's not gonna work, it's gonna have to be another way. And then the rest of Matthew chapter five is where Jesus goes through and does all of the you've heard it said, but I tell you that stuff about the law where he goes from, you know, it's not enough to just not do external actions. That isn't true obedience to God. The heart has to match, and you can't control that, and neither can the Pharisees. The point is, these are the ideal values of the kingdom at the level of the action and at the level of the heart, and also no matter how much you might have your behavior and even your heart on a leash, you can't totally get this right. And you are going to need a righteousness greater than that of the Pharisees, the best behaved people ever, in order to get this right, meaning it's impossible. Even if you got to write all the rules yourself, you would still break the ones you wrote. You're going to need a righteousness apart from the law. You're going to need a righteousness that is from God. And in Acts chapter 13, that is what is being spelled out by Paul at Pisidian Antioch, and that is why this thing is hitting. They're getting it, they're feeling the lesson. It might feel a little bit like grandpa tough love that they're getting from Paul, but this is going to hit for a bunch of people. Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him, everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses. And Paul echoes. Jesus' teachings and expands on Paul's own words in Acts 13, again in Romans 3, when he says, Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law. Rather, through the law we become conscious of sin, but now a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify, this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. When Grandpa let me run all the way to the end of doing the tasks he assigned me with my high effort but ultimately failed approaches, it was taxing and it all seemed very hard. When he then showed me how to do it right after I knew how to do it wrong, it all seemed so easy. It all made so much sense. And I have to imagine that for the people who responded to this message that Paul was proclaiming about Jesus, it was kind of the same thing. Maybe there was sort of a dividing line between people, even, some of whom were like, huh, it's really that easy. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. Ha! Well, I tried my way, and it was clunky and complicated and overwrought, and ultimately doesn't work. This is elegantly simple. It's a beautiful solution to the human problem, the problem of sin, failure, death, all of it. Huh. So often that's how things work, isn't it? The solution is right there in front of us, and it's elegant and simple and beautiful and obvious once you see it. And I think people who had their eyes open to see it that way were able to say, okay, I embrace the simplicity of this, I embrace the childlike trust in God of this, I'm in. And I think for other people, it was hard, and they had trouble overcoming their deeply, maybe most deeply held belief that ultimately they were going to solve the human problem and they were going to be the agent of their own atonement and their own forgiveness. And I have empathy for the people who struggled with this when Paul came and talked about it, because that can be a hard leap to make. But ultimately, Grandpa's solutions were always the simpler and the righter ones, because he knew and we didn't. And this is the case here as well. Why did all these people hear something that only took a page to explain and give their lives and their hearts and their hopes to Jesus and embrace this story? Because it's max of truth. It's max of the thing that makes sense. And it's the only avenue to forgiveness, atonement, and rightness with God that they had ever heard that had that kind of credibility. And I don't think they could help but respond. And really nothing has changed between then and now. The same message is in effect, the same work of God is in effect. Ultimately, I suppose curiosity and fun are big reasons why I do this, why we do this together. But bottom line is the reason that we do this together is because my heart's been changed by this message. I'm in on this. I'm prepared to give up on my imagined ability to solve my problem, the deep problem, my way. This way makes more sense. I believe this way has the backing of the God of the universe behind it, the one who owns the concepts of forgiveness and grace and love and atonement. And it's liberating and life-giving to read these pages and to see what this whole story of this whole document and all of history adds up to, and to realize, wow, it really is just that elegantly simple. God has done the work here. That message was powerful then. That message is powerful now. And I know this is a ridiculously long conversation, but it's important for two reasons. One, practically for the sake of the season that we're working on right now. I think we got to have this on lockdown to understand what's being discussed and why Galatians exists. But also personally, I mean, this is kind of the point. I know there's a whole bunch of us here who are in very different places on this. I get that. I feel no impatience with that, but I will say this. There are a bunch of you here I know who find this all to be really interesting, and yet, like you would say, Oh, I'm not in. I super respect you for being here and being interested and willing to put the time and the energy into it. I would just put one last thing out before I turn off the microphone here. This might be for you too, and it might be simpler than you thought. That's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.